OpenAI allegedly did this be more cautious about publishing research highlighting artificial intelligence’s potentially negative impact on the economy, four people familiar with the matter tell WIRED.
According to the same four people who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, the perceived disengagement has contributed to the departure of at least two employees of OpenAI’s economic research team in recent months.
One of those employees, Tom Cunningham, left the company in September after finding it was becoming tough to publish high-quality research, WIRED has learned. In a farewell message shared internally, Cunningham wrote that the team faced growing tension between conducting stringent analysis and functioning as a de facto support arm of OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Cunningham declined WIRED’s request for comment.
OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, addressed these concerns in an internal memo issued after Cunningham’s departure. In a copy of the message obtained by WIRED, Kwon argued that OpenAI must act as a responsible leader in the AI sector and should not only report problems with the technology but also “build solutions.”
“My point of view on difficult topics is not that we shouldn’t talk about them,” Kwon said on Slack. “Rather, because we are not just a research institution but also an actor in the world (in fact, a leading actor) that exposes the subject of research (AI) to the world, we are expected to take the results into account.”
In a statement to WIRED, OpenAI spokesman Rob Friedlander said the company hired its first chief economist, Aaron Chatterji, last year and has since expanded the scope of its economic research.
“The economics research team conducts rigorous analysis that helps OpenAI, policymakers and society understand how people use AI and how it shapes the broader economy, including where benefits emerge and where social impacts or disruptions may emerge as the technology evolves,” Friedlander said.
The alleged change comes as OpenAI deepens its multi-billion-dollar partnerships with corporations and governments, cementing itself as a central player in the global economy. Experts believe the technology being developed by OpenAI has the potential to change the way people work, although there are still substantial questions about when this change will happen and to what extent it will impact people and global markets.
Since 2016, OpenAI has regularly published research on how its own systems can reshape the labor market and shared the data with external economists. In 2023, he co-published the widely cited paper “GPTs Are GPTs,” which examined which sectors were likely to be most susceptible to automation. Over the past year, however, two sources say the company has become more reluctant to publish work highlighting the economic drawbacks of AI – such as job relocation – and has favored publishing positive findings.