Helen Toner

Like who really knows? Most people did not respond super affirmatively to that.

Helen Toner, no less than Helen Toner, gave me a come on, man.

But most people seem to think, ah, this is still like pretty far off.

Although maybe coming soon, right? So we're in one of these weird AI analyses.

It's clear that many people who have departed AI companies have gone on to have incredible impact outside of them, maybe more impact than they had in them.

There's Geoffrey Hinton, Beth Barnes, Jacob Coxon, David Robinson, Helen Toner, and Daniel Coccatello.

They all jump to mind as possible cases.

So don't be intimidated into silence.

Too quickly and already it might be difficult to catch up with.

I'm thinking of people – Helen Toner who runs an AI safety institute at Georgetown now was on the board at OpenAI, a company you invest in.

People like that who are sounding the siren here a little bit.

I think there's a lot of times in life when you look at a problem and you wish you could have started earlier.

It's a huge irony, I think, that many effective altruists and EA adjacent people have been both banging the drum about AI danger and are also on the front lines of building artificial intelligence.

I mean, the OpenAI board had effective altruists and EA adjacent people like Helen Toner from the start.

Dario Amede was an early signer of the giving what we can pledge.

His sister married Holden Karnofsky, who I believe was one of the co-founders of GiveWell, one of the organizations that has done the most to identify the philanthropies that do the most with the money that they're given.

They didn't release the original Cloud One until the later release of ChatGPT because they didn't want to accelerate AI progress.

For the true insiders, you may remember that Helen Toner, one of the board members of OpenAI, praised that approach And that really pissed off Sam Altman, who tried to get her fired, but in so doing caused Sutskova and others to rally around to get him fired, which happened in November of 2023.

Yes, you could say all of that debacle, which only some of you will remember, traces back.

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In this New Yorker exclusive, we learn that some members of the board found Sam Altman an unnervingly slippery operator.

One of the board members, Helen Toner, had written a paper covered in one of my previous videos that was slightly critical of the release of ChatGPT.

Anyway, Sam Altman began approaching other board members individually about replacing her, and here comes the key moment.

When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them, and in the eyes of the board, he'd play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought, the person familiar with the board's discussions told me.

People just say things.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar makes statements that are highly false on CBS about the Hugging Face incident, saying that, "The models did not do anything they were not instructed to do," and even, "They were not in a sandbox," and, "were not given a constraint." Helen Toner offers correctives.

Either Sankar knows better or he doesn't.

Either way, shame.