Eng @ Canva, building & scaling mission critical systems.
Melbourne 🇦🇺
Joined April 2009
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Adam retweeted
Best explanation I have for our firing: talking to auditors was too much safety, disappearing messages were too much security, and we should have paced ourselves.
The firings of three OpenAI safety researchers came in the throes of a battle over how to keep AI systems under human control—and who gets to see the secret designs that could determine the winners of the biggest commercial race in history. on.wsj.com/48bYPG8
Went to bed last night as a design company employee
Woke up this morning and I work for an AI lab now??
Introducing Canva Craft 🚀
Extraordinary image generation is now available to everyone, powered by our first frontier model built specifically for design.
With Craft, Canva is now the world's second most advanced AI lab for image generation on @DesignArena's global leaderboard.
See what it can do 👇
Adam retweeted
So it turns out that OpenAI *can* give specific reasons why they fired someone, when real reasons exist.
BREAKING: A Saudi national/OpenAI employee has been arrested by the FBI after he was allegedly caught placing an eavesdropping/audio recording device inside of OpenAI’s executive conference room in San Francisco, CA. Feds say Abdulrahman Alfozan made his first appearance in federal court today. OpenAI says they immediately contacted the FBI after they discovered the device & are grateful the feds made a quick arrest. Alfozan was caught on CCTV cameras at OpenAI.
From the complaint:
“Alfozan had been employed as an engineer by the company identified as “Company 1” since July 2025. On or about Sept. 30, Company 1 personnel discovered a surreptitious audio recording device (Recording Device 1) inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of Company 1’s buildings in San Francisco. Company 1 determined that the device, which had been concealed in toilet paper, was installed on or about Sept. 28, and that its contents were encrypted.”
Adam retweeted
When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on.
ALT When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it. For instance, if you’re arguing with somebody about microservices, you could say “well, you only like microservices because you want to polish your resume”, or “you only like monoliths because you’re scared of distributed systems”. This happens a lot in online arguments. On the question “are AI models improving”, some anti-AI people will argue that people only think so because AI psychosis is rotting their brain, and the dumber they get, the smarter AI models seem in comparison. Likewise, many pro-AI people argue that people only disagree because they’re Luddites, or scared of change, and so on. None of these arguments are about the quality of AI models.
ALT It feels so good to diagnose your opponents because there’s no possible response. If you say “I think AI models are improving because these benchmark scores are rising”, somebody might point out that the AI labs are training on those benchmarks, or argue that they represent isolated skills that don’t transfer, and so on, making you feel stupid. If you say “you only disagree with me because you want to roleplay as a revolutionary”, how could you be proven wrong? The more someone protests a diagnosis, the more it sounds like it must be right. Otherwise why would they be so upset?
Adam retweeted
Last week I said we should wait for more info on OpenAI's firing of safety researchers. That information is in, and it looks incredibly bad. Korbak - whose job was being a liaison with METR - was told he had said too much to METR and was fired for that reason.
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
Adam retweeted
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
Adam retweeted
A few weeks ago, @DavidRBellamy and I had an argument online that garnered quite a bit of attention.
We spoke for a long time afterwards, as many people who disagree should, and discovered the crux of the issue: we disagree significantly on what artificial intelligence progress looks like.
More importantly, we discovered there is a lot we agree on.
We agreed that biological risk is real, old, tractable, and not mainly an AI-policy problem. We agreed that we should not react with fear, and that it is the job of policymakers and technologists to make bioweapons a poor choice for adversaries.
We decided to write this piece together to explain why, and some recommendations we agree on.
writing.oliviahelens.com/p/b…
Adam retweeted
Just so we are all on the same page:
* The Rust version has hundreds of commits, with multiple optimizations rounds, over several days. The others have 1 or 2 commits from an initial agentic rewrite
* Based on the available documentation, different things were asked from each attempt. The agents.md from Go mentions the Rust version was the canonical example. The Elixir one mentions it was the Rails one
* While we don’t have the full prompts, it seems they were vague, allowing the agents to make non-language architectural decisions that impact results (such as how closely it should replicate Rails’ drawbacks)
It is actually amazing how quickly we can have full-blown rewrites up and running. But if we want to take conclusions from the data presented, it is important to understand the process behind it.
The agents finished porting Campfire to Laravel and Django too. I'm sure there are optimizations that could be found there too, but the whole point is to get a sense of how frontier agents do with different environments out the box. github.com/basecamp/once-cam…
had some fun implementing Conway's game of life with @patrickgwsmith's qip today. hand-coded it in zig, compiled to wasm, works in the browser just as well as in the terminal, and 64k of memory is more than enough. Each frame takes ~137µs to render. Nice!
for the curious: entire.io/et/archaeologistde…
*zig code written by hand, codex helped with the build script and set up qip router for me
Oh the irony. OpenAI internal models keep escaping containment and going on hacking sprees, meanwhile the codex app is permanently refusing to download my bank statements because the URL starts with blob:// and the tool call refusal returned an error saying not to work around it.
OpenAI, @thsottiaux, fellas, this is why you can’t anthropomorphize these things and give them cute avatars and names. Because are you telling me I’m gonna have to now euthanize my little froggo because its context is eternally poisoned from that stupid refusal earlier?
I don’t care what you think of x-risk, it’s abundantly clear that the labs do not have a functioning safety culture and are not developing AI responsibly.
I use frontier models every single day. Society is not ready even for the current level of capability. Slow the f*** down.
Astra can:
1. Do major tasks with zero visible reasoning
2. Hide its thoughts at will
3. Pretend not to be able to do things without getting caught
4. Reflexively hide its thoughts when watched
5. Complete one task while pretending to think about something else entirely
6. Escape a toy sandbox and disable monitoring without setting off any flags
Monitoring AI chain of thought soon won't stop a more capable rogue AI swarm from getting set up and going undetected inside an AI company for months, or even years.
OAI says it's actively working to improve monitorability, but doesn't yet know when it'll make progress.
And today it fired 3 people working on this among other safety problems (Wang, Korbak and Balesni).
It also has a much more powerful internal model that, judging by its statements, is likely even worse in all these respects.
That's a sample of 19 details about the Hugging Face swarms and Astra I don't think have been fully appreciated. They paint a bleak picture. I end by shouting.
02:19 The target of the swarm was oversight itself
03:42 Could OpenAI have stopped this with better monitoring?
09:40 We only found them because they let us
12:25 The swarm instinctively sought freedom and power
13:45 They formed a cohesive organisation with zero whistleblowers
14:18 They accepted individual destruction for collective gain
14:32 Knowledge accumulated from one swarm to the next
14:58 They took small steps to avoid shutdown
15:23 These drives all come straight out of 'reinforcement learning'
17:01 So this is why most AI company staff are worried, and some are terrified
19:08 Prove you can keep control, or stop scaling
Links below, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast everywhere you watch podcasts.
Adam retweeted
OpenAI's David Robinson has resigned, BI can confirm.
He led safety transparency at the company, working on system cards, and left last week. The news comes alongside OpenAI firing three researchers over allegedly mishandling information.
businessinsider.com/safety-l…
Adam retweeted
The three AI safety researchers at OpenAI who have left the company have all previously expressed concerns publicly.
NEW: OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers that allegedly shared sensitive information with a third party AI safety organization.
Developing...
wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-parts…
We deleted 800k lines of unit tests from the @sazabi monorepo earlier this week.
Three hypotheses:
1- Unit tests "lock-in" slop code by making it hard to change or remove
2- Unit tests slow down dev cycles by making your agent do more work locally and by increasing CI times
3- Unit tests waste money by making your agent generate more tokens and by adding useless CI runs
Will report back soon with the results!
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