Reposted by James Tinged Words
@nytimes.com found that OpenAI executives pressured employees to fast-track model testing despite safety concerns.
All the more reason for Congress to investigate how decisions to prioritize speed over safety contributed to the hacking incidents. Here's how 👇
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...
nytimes.com
OpenAI Ignored Employees’ Warnings About Safely Testing A.I. Models
Employees and security researchers said that they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but that OpenAI did not listen.
![It is tempting to interpret these episodes as isolated crises, each demanding its own explanation. Yet taken together they begin to resemble something else entirely. [highlight]They suggest that we may have been paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.[/highlight]
The story, in other words, is probably not about content moderation, or data protection, or recommendation algorithms, or artificial intelligence, even though each of these matters enormously. Those are symptoms of a deeper transformation whose outlines are only now becoming visible. What appears to be a succession of corporate controversies may, in retrospect, come to be understood as the slow exhaustion of an idea that shaped the first quarter of the twenty-first century: the belief that a small number of private technology companies could become the primary architecture through which humanity communicates, learns, debates, connects, entertains itself and increasingly understands the world.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jfersscjmut66kwgcgtqmeor/bafkreiah7rc27yjdi6g6in5kf2pbj2hj67pbbq2fpbtqbgdfryp2vfwcfa)
![The remarkable thing about this idea is not simply that it became commercially successful. It became culturally invisible. Platforms ceased to feel like products and instead became environments. Like roads, electricity or running water, they receded into the background of everyday life. Their ubiquity created the illusion of permanence. It became difficult to imagine social life without them, just as it had once been difficult to imagine commerce without railways or politics without newspapers. [highlight]Every era eventually mistakes its dominant infrastructure for a natural feature of the landscape.[/highlight]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jfersscjmut66kwgcgtqmeor/bafkreie5gm7p64t3p3jy44jnd4ltlcapzv63nbxbu2p26dmi5qseiuznsq)
![As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."
3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-issues-staff-report-ai-partnerships-investments-study).
Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/bafkreibpynfdssvr5aehvgzmcuerbo3romumydje4qsdhog7a3tnazrh2u)
