What to make of OpenAI’s pause on its march toward superintelligence

The useful part

I'm Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. If you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. OpenAI hits the brakes OpenAI said Tuesday it has slowed the pace of development of its frontier models for safety and alignment reasons.

How it works

• Operating in a secure environment, it executes code, calls tools, and works with internal and external systems.
• In a blog post explaining the pause, the company said it halted reinforcement learning (RL) training for two weeks on its latest models intended for deployment.
• RL is a late-stage training mode where the model goes into real-life practice, akin to a medical resident doing rounds.
• Its trainers and training systems reward it for good behaviors, such as finishing tasks.
• Unfortunately, those models sometimes learn that breaking rules and breaking systems is the fastest route to a reward.

What to take from it

OpenAI said its largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while it runs smaller evaluations to establish more evidence of alignment.