Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
He was fired because an employee reported to the board that their project Q* was becoming a potential threat to humanity, and Altman had not been truthful about this to the board.
Article (Swedish): https://tt.omni.se/skrammande-varningsbrev-bakom-altmans-avsked/a/wAoJvG
'We are the sole custodians of this godlike technology that we can barely control but that we will let you access for a fee' has been a mainstay of OpenAI marketing as long as Altman has been CEO, it's really no wonder this was 'leaked' as soon as he was back in charge.
It works, too! Anthropic just announced they are giving chat access to a 200k token context model (chatgtp4 is >10k I think) where they supposedly cut the rate of hallucinations in half and it barely made headlines.