Dave Willner, OpenAI’s trust and safety head, has resigned. Why?

Last updated on July 24th, 2023 at 07:56 am

OpenAI’s head of trust and safety, Dave Willner, said he was leaving the company because of the stress his job put on his family life. Willner wrote in a LinkedIn post that he would be open to working as an advisor.

He said that he decided to quit because his job had become more difficult, which made his personal life worse. “I think anyone with young kids and a very demanding job can relate to that tension, and the last few months have made it clear to me that I had to put one or the other first,” he wrote.

Willner joined OpenAI in February 2017 after working at Airbnb and Facebook.

Tech companies like OpenAI, Twitter, Alphabet, and Meta have put a lot of effort into their trust and security departments to stop hate speech and false information from spreading on their platforms.

This summer, taught my kids to swim and ride bikes at the top of my OKRs (objectives and key results).

OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT has become very popular with us. OpenAInAI has said that it depends on its trust and safety team to build the processes and tools that will stop AI technologies from being misused or abused.

Wilner had said before that there needs to be a balance between the need to reduce serious risks and the need to let different values grow.

When they spoke at a congressional hearing in May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other leaders in the AI industry called for more rules. Altman called for the creation of a new agency that would be in charge of giving licenses for AI technology. These licenses, he said, should be taken away if companies don’t follow safety rules.