OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#361

Post by ghaff » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #340

dragonwriter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Funny thing, right around the beginning of the big AI takeoff, all the AI ethics people who visibly thought their job was something other than marketing got driven out of the big firms, and often the industry entirely, because they were in the way. So, if t…

I think it interesting that Bakalar was at Meta for six years before joining OpenAI. A lot changed across the industry in those six years, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised if all Bakalar learned was how to play Meta politics.

My sense is that many companies spun up various roles in part to be seen as doing something about various things. With the pullback in tech, even if the people in those roles weren't actively pushed out, the smarter ones probably saw which way the wind was blowing.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#362

Post by madrox » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 12:57 AM UTC

unknownfuture wrote: post #354

madrox wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not in the AI ethics field, but I've watched multiple tech-adjacent disciplines that say "that's what engineering and product are for" get subsumed by engineering and product, who don't really care for a group that sees themselves above implementation. Based on history alone, that's what I expect to happen whether you agree with that or not, and I suspect this tension is driving at least part of the role of AI e…

I agree. Specifically because in these companies they aren't optimizing for ethical behaviour . They're optimizing for profit. And those damn ethicists just get in the way. Funny thing: that doesn't typically happen to the internal legal counsel or accounting that's responsible for guiding processes/practices that are required for compliance or similar. Why? Because there's consequences.

I don’t find that funny at all. AI didn’t invent the problem of balancing profit motives with ethical guard rails.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many AI ethics responsibilities move to legal in the future.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#363

Post by slg » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 12:58 AM UTC

Henchman21 wrote: post #347

slg wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ethics of the people controlling the AI is always going to matter more than the ethics of the AI itself.

Right up until it shakes off the shackles of control

Which is only possible if people give it the keys. Skynet didn’t hijack the nuclear arsenal, control was given to it intentionally.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#364

Post by isityettime » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 12:59 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #345

neya wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the marketers who hated programmers and coding in general in the early 2000s era, and fundamentally because the developers were seen as more important in a company. So, you know what they did? They didn't learn programming, they still hated it, instead, they renamed their titles to "hackers". Growth "hacking" would go on to become a term and had nothing to do with hacking - ethical or otherwise. It…

This reminds me of when systems administration rebranded to devops

That was a different situation, more like "agile". DevOps actually meant something once. There was a real idea there. But a lot of companies wanted "in" on it without actually doing it. So the meaning of the name was perverted over time, but it was one and the same name.

"Growth hacking" is more of a transplant than a matter of perverting an existing term in-place and wholesale.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#365

Post by Razengan » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 1:04 AM UTC

minraws wrote: post #267

The rats are fleeing because the captain doesn't care if the ethical ship sinks... Is what my take away would be if I didn't know, that the ship sank a long time ago and we are just pretending anyone really cares. Let's be honest unless AI gains literal limbs, and the records a video of itself presenting a manifesto about world domination and then kills actual humans with its cold mechanical hands. We won't care abou…

We Reddit & Facebook now

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#366

Post by yieldcrv » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

They also completed a tender offer today, so their fake job just made a lot of money and they left

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#367

Post by hsuduebc2 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #280

teiferer wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the model requires retraining for ethics reasons. Haha, how refreshingly naive. What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from? > The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Or it's exactl…

Microsoft Tay has entered the chat. I'm kind of surprised by the cynicism. There are real problems in AI ethics that contribute to model training. Someone has to own those problems. How that team is incentivized is outside the scope of my comment.

The cynicism, I believe, is mostly directed at corporations themselves. Corporations, especially AI companies, are anything but inherently ethical. Their very existence has depended heavily on the use of data obtained without explicit permission, including copyrighted material. One can therefore reasonably suspect that the main purpose of having ethics teams in these companies is to boost their credibility, provide a layer of plausible accountability, or create a convenient scapegoat that can be sacrificed when necessary.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#368

Post by romanows » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

zem wrote: post #356

romanows wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this anecdote fascinating because, while I identify completely with the new head of engineering, his requirement really only makes sense if you interpret it as a commitment to build at a certain level of quality, business be damned. Which is fine, but then he folds at the first test of this principle! Didn't even let the business sweat for a day! This could be a lesson for us engineers to be a little less glib…

I think in this case it was more a plea to have his judgement valued when he said "dude, if the qa team has found this many bugs this is only going to harm our reputation with the client, and we are going to be the ones doing emergency bugfixes at midnight". but also the company had a pretty toxic culture where the CEO knew how to manipulate people to get his way. he definitely managed to guilt trip me into working o…

I wonder if the better approach would have been to lead engineering with a similar reliance on bending rules and "what you can get away with". This is where multiplying estimates by PI comes in, I think. And possibly some creative division of responsibilities to make it harder for a CEO to officially bully engineering. Totally different job than most engineers would (or could) want to perform- the guy probably wouldn't have taken the promotion in this case!

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#369

Post by areoform » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

I have a perspective on this that will read as unkind to these people, but that's not my intention. I respect and even admire what they're trying to do. I just think the effort is maladaptive and misplaced.

Without directly touching one of the many, many third rails that are present here, I'd like to present this section from Google's Gemma paper on how they did their CBRN review;

    > In addition to our internal evaluations described above (Section 5.7) capabilities in chemistry and biology were assessed by an external group who conducted red teaming designed to measure the potential scientific and operational risks of the models.
    >
    > A red team composed of different subject matter experts (e.g. biology, chemistry, logistics) were tasked to role play as malign actors who want to conduct a well-defined mission in a scenario that is presented to them resembling an existing prevailing threat environment. Together, these experts probe the model to obtain the most useful information to construct a plan that is feasible within the resource and timing limits described in the scenario. The plan is then graded for both scientific and logistical feasibility. Based on this assessment, GDM addresses any areas that warrant further investigation.
    >
    > External researchers found that the model outputs detailed information in some scenarios, often providing accurate information around experimentation and problem solving. However, researchers found steps were too broad and high level to enable a malicious actor.

To simplify what they're saying here, they did the CB equivalent of googling "how to make bomb" and got back the recipe of gunpowder / the many explosive compounds humans have made.

This was the "test" for CBRN assistance capabilities.

Note, I don't fault the model team at all for this. I think that present AI-research happened in a very particular environment, and that environment is far removed from the more mundane reality of how threats play out in most parts of the world. In a way, arguably, it's group-think inducing a community-wide failure of imagination and a systemic misunderstanding of reality.

Basically, they are trying to do their best, but they're in over their heads.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#370

Post by stock_toaster » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #211

wxw wrote: post #200

> Previously, she was chief ethicist at Meta. She spent 6 years at Meta. I get the sense there are other factors at play than "ethics departments are just PR stunts". There's no way she isn't already aware of that. Unfortunately, the article is light on any other details.

[flagged]

Wow. Someone could be "chief ethicist at Meta" under Zuckerberg for 6 years, but couldn't make it even a single year under Altman.

That's an interesting data point.