Researchers fear safety disaster ahead of OpenAI’s Astra release

OpenAI bigwigs responded to the criticism in a series of social media posts that do not explicitly deny the company’s use of the technique. Several expressed concerns about the possibility of unmonitorable AI or a race to the bottom in terms of transparency, including OpenAI safety researchers Micah Carroll and Tomek Korbak, head of strategic futures Dean Ball, and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who voiced fears of “a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting.” He said the depth of Astra’s computation — a measure of how many steps it can perform internally — “is within a factor of two of GPT-4,” indicating that if the technique was used, the increased opacity is less dramatic than some reactions imply. OpenAI did not respond to The Verge’s request to confirm or deny whether looped transformers were used for Astra and directed us to Pachocki’s X post.