As a Research Scientist at OpenAI, you'll be responsible for analyzing the AI policy landscape; developing and defining OpenAI's policy positions; representing those policy positions in public and private forums; and engaging with relevant stakeholders and information sources to further your own technical understanding of artificial intelligence. This role offers candidates the chance to define and shape OpenAI's policy activities and affords them considerable latitude in how they approach the role. There will also be ample opportunities to collaborate with OpenAI's other teams, including the AI Safety team, to craft technically-informed policy. OpenAI has a range of policy interests relating to AI which include (but are not limited to): forecasting the rate of progress of AI technologies, analyzing how malicious actors may re-purpose AI, understanding how AI might change the geopolitical landscape, and exploring how AI will alter the makeup of the economies it is deployed into.

Billionaire Elon Musk confirmed that he exited OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research group, on "good terms" amid disagreements with team members over the project's direction. Musk also cited a desire to focus on "solving a painfully large number of engineering and manufacturing problems at Tesla (especially) and SpaceX." On Twitter, Musk suggested he had encountered some conflicts of interest because Tesla was competing for some of the same people that OpenAI wanted to recruit. "I didn't agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do. Add that all up, and it was just better to part ways on good terms."

OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, has decided not to release an AI system that can generate news stories and fiction on the grounds that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. OpenAI is a non-profit company that aims to finding a way to safely bring about artificial general intelligence. Normally it releases its research to the public, but its latest AI model, known as GPT-2, is reportedly so convincing that it has too much potential for misuse, generating huge volumes of misleading news stories. GPT-2 takes a sample of text (a few words of several paragraphs) and predicts the following sentences in a similar style, with surprisingly plausible results. The system was trained using a dataset of roughly 10 million news articles sourced by trawling Reddit – several times the size of those used by previous state-of-the-art systems. The sheer volume of data gave the system a much better understanding of written language, and means it's more general purpose than other systems.

The use of fake news stories for political disinformation has become a major concern for governments around the world in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded Russia used false news reports, spread through social media, to try to sway voters. Writing these stories still needed someone to sit behind a keyboard. Now OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research group in San Francisco, has unveiled a machine learning algorithm that can generate coherent text, including fake news articles, after being given just a small sample to build on. The algorithm can be tuned to imitate the writing style of the sample text.

OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content. Built based on 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources on the Internet (including "all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma"), GPT-2 generates plausible "news" stories and other text that match the style and content of a brief text prompt. The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus. Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code.

AI research nonprofit OpenAI has created a system that can generate fake text from a single line -- and it's not open-sourcing the code for fear of misuse. OpenAI was cofounded by tech mogul Elon Musk, and its sponsors include Silicon Valley heavy-hitters such as Peter Thiel and Amazon Web Services. Last year it gained the praise of Bill Gates after it built a team of five neural networks capable of beating human players in the computer game "Dota 2." Read more: Bill Gates hails "huge milestone" for AI as bots work in a team to destroy humans at video game "Dota 2" Now the company has created a system, named GPT2, capable of imitating and generating text based on only a sentence. The Guardian's Alex Hern got to play with the system, and tried typing in a single Guardian headline about Brexit. From that headline alone, GPT2 was able to generate quotes from UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as well as a fictional spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May.

I have worked on the problem of open-sourcing Machine Learning versus sensitivity for a long time, especially in disaster response contexts: when is it right/wrong to release data or a model publicly? This article is a list of frequently asked questions, the answers that are best practice today, and some examples of where I have encountered them. The criticism of OpenAI's decision included how it limits the research community's ability to replicate the results, and how the action in itself contributes to media fear of AI that is hyperbolic right now. It was this tweet that first caught my eye. Anima Anankumar has a lot of experience bridging the gap between research and practical applications of Machine Learning.

So convincing, in fact, that the researchers have refrained from open-sourcing the code, in hopes of stalling its potential weaponization as a means of mass-producing fake news. An OpenAI employee printed out this AI-written sample and posted it by the recycling bin: https://t.co/PT8CMSU2AR While the impressive results are a remarkable leap beyond what existing language models have achieved, the technique involved isn't exactly new. Instead, the breakthrough was driven primarily by feeding the algorithm ever more training data--a trick that has also been responsible for most of the other recent advancements in teaching AI to read and write. "It's kind of surprising people in terms of what you can do with [...] more data and bigger models," says Percy Liang, a computer science professor at Stanford.

The organization created a machine learning algorithm, GPT-2, that can produce natural-looking language largely indistinguishable from that of a human writer while largely "unsupervised" – it needs only a small prompt text to provide the subject and context for the task. The team have made some strides toward this lofty goal, but have also somewhat inadvertently admitted that, once perfected, the device can mass-produce fake news on an unprecedented scale. "We have observed various failure modes," the team observed. "Such as repetitive text, world modelling failures (eg the model sometimes writes about fires happening under water), and unnatural topic switching." Here's a short story i generated using OpenAI's GPT-2 tool (prompt in bold) pic.twitter.com/DGIVwGuAUV

Researchers at the non-profit AI research group OpenAI just wanted to train their new text generation software to predict the next word in a sentence. It blew away all of their expectations and was so good at mimicking writing by humans they've decided to pump the brakes on the research while they explore the damage it could do. Elon Musk has been clear that he believes artificial intelligence is the "biggest existential threat" to humanity. Musk is one of the primary funders of OpenAI and though he has taken a backseat role at the organization, its researchers appear to share his concerns about opening a Pandora's box of trouble. This week, OpenAI shared a paper covering their latest work on text generation technology but they're deviating from their standard practice of releasing the full research to the public out of fear that it could be abused by bad actors.