Half of this story seems to be about the ScarJo "Her" voice story, which was more or less debunked by the Washington Post --- OpenAI hired several voice actors, months before reaching out to ScarJo, and the voice suspected to be a clone or performance of ScarJo's own voice was the natural speaking voice of one of those actors, who was not instructed to mimic ScarJo or given any reference to "Her". †
The rest of it is about "safety" whistleblowers. That's something that seems like it could be a real problem for OpenAI, if you believe that transformer models are something that raise genuine safety issues, or if you take seriously OpenAI's founding commitments to be something more like a monastic society than a company.
For some time now, I've mentally bucketed OpenAI in with all the other tech companies, and I find that perspective pretty refreshing; there's just not much to think about here, apart from the technology, because, to my eyes, it's not reasonable to expect a lot more of OpenAI than I would from Apple or Google. Is OpenAI becoming less and less like a religion and more like a hyper-rational technology business? To me: that's a good thing. It is fine that we disagree.
† I anticipate many responses about the subtle angles of this silly voice actor story that I am not capturing, like Altman's professed love for the movie "Her", and to all that I'll preemptively respond: you do you, we (again) can simply disagree, I would have delighted in a news cycle where a giant tech company actually gets shredded by Rebecca from Ghost World, but I found the WaPo story dispositive.
The rest of it is about "safety" whistleblowers. That's something that seems like it could be a real problem for OpenAI, if you believe that transformer models are something that raise genuine safety issues, or if you take seriously OpenAI's founding commitments to be something more like a monastic society than a company.
For some time now, I've mentally bucketed OpenAI in with all the other tech companies, and I find that perspective pretty refreshing; there's just not much to think about here, apart from the technology, because, to my eyes, it's not reasonable to expect a lot more of OpenAI than I would from Apple or Google. Is OpenAI becoming less and less like a religion and more like a hyper-rational technology business? To me: that's a good thing. It is fine that we disagree.
† I anticipate many responses about the subtle angles of this silly voice actor story that I am not capturing, like Altman's professed love for the movie "Her", and to all that I'll preemptively respond: you do you, we (again) can simply disagree, I would have delighted in a news cycle where a giant tech company actually gets shredded by Rebecca from Ghost World, but I found the WaPo story dispositive.