OpenAI Ethicist Departs: No Replacement Named

OpenAI's sole ethicist, Chloé Bakalar, reportedly left the company last month and has not been replaced. She was hired in August of the previous year. Before joining OpenAI, Bakalar was Meta’s chief ethicist, where she established AI ethics policies for Instagram and Facebook. She specialized in ethical approaches to model development and how humans interact with AI. What's interesting is that OpenAI is now reportedly without a dedicated ethicist. This comes as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated, "We are now, like, in the singularity." This contrasts with Bakalar's previous statements that large language models are "prediction machines" and not "emotive, feeling, entities." The bottom line is that the absence of an ethicist could be significant for a company at the forefront of AI development.