Now we know what OpenAI's superalignment team has been up to

Less than a month after OpenAI was rocked by a crisis when its CEO, Sam Altman, was fired by its oversight board (in an apparent coup led by chief scientist Ilya Sutskever) and then reinstated three days later, the message is clear: it's back to business as usual. Yet OpenAI's business is not usual. Many researchers still question whether machines will ever match human intelligence, let alone outmatch it. OpenAI's team takes machines' eventual superiority as given. "AI progress in the last few years has been just extraordinarily rapid," says Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher on the superalignment team.