The ChatGPT maker is also beefing up its security systems.<\/p>\n
ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it\u2019s pausing the research and development of its newest AI models. This is a big course reversal for the firm, which has maintained that it can mitigate the significant cybersecurity risks posed by new AI models.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,\u201d the company wrote in a blog post. It added that its upcoming model, named Astra, may meet its \u201ccritical cybersecurity capabilities\u201d threshold, a red flag in its internal benchmarking system. All this follows an incident last month when some AI agents, or bots, escaped a training environment and hacked HuggingFace, a popular AI platform.<\/p>\n
Cybersecurity has long been an issue for companies in the age of AI, but three separate incidents of AI agents autonomously hacking websites have raised serious concerns about AI companies\u2019 ability to control the tech they created. Anthropic and Meta, whose agents were responsible for other incidents, have responded with similar promises to improve cybersecurity guardrails. OpenAI says it is strengthening its guardrails in its testing environments, including beefing up its monitoring and alert systems.<\/p>\n
The pause makes sense \u2014 if you can\u2019t control the tech you already have, don\u2019t keep making more. But the move raises other questions about OpenAI\u2019s operations in what is an ever-changing, financially consequential industry.<\/p>\n
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told TIME that the pause has allowed the company to reallocate two key resources: researchers and compute. While more OpenAI employees focus on making AI obey humans (a concept called AI alignment), the computer power that was previously being used to train new models can be shifted to other services, like maintaining existing models.<\/p>\n
Researching and training new AI models is a compute-intensive process. It\u2019s why so many tech companies want to build new data centers, to give them the computing firepower they need, despite widespread backlash. OpenAI says in its blog post: \u201cOur current estimates put monitoring overhead at roughly 20% of the inference compute being monitored,\u201d meaning that monitoring AI models during the training process accounts for a significant portion of OpenAI\u2019s compute.<\/p>\n
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment on its plans.<\/p>\n
The adjustment also raises questions around OpenAI\u2019s financial viability. AI companies have yet to turn a significant profit; they are burning through billions of investors\u2019 dollars, with compute eating up the lion\u2019s share of their bills. OpenAI\u2019s operating losses are now at a whopping $12.3 billion, growing by $3 billion from last quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports. Anthropic, which makes Claude, is now reportedly bringing in more revenue than OpenAI. Also not helping are the recent departures of the company\u2019s chief revenue officer and former chief operating officer, Denise Dresser and Brad Lightcap, respectively.<\/p>\n
In other words, it\u2019s possible that OpenAI has decided to pause the training of new AI models because it can simply no longer afford to keep doing so.<\/p>\n
This matters a lot as OpenAI and Anthropic chase what could be record-breaking initial public offerings, which makes them into public companies that anyone can invest in. The AI leaders have to prove to Wall Street, and all of us, that their companies are safe, useful and ultimately economically viable. Serious cybersecurity concerns, in addition to threatening our actual security, cast doubt on the industry\u2019s long-term viability.<\/p>\n