OpenAI has announced the appointment of a brand new board member: Zico Kolter.
Kolter, a professor and director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, focuses his research totally on AI security, making him an “invaluable technical director for governance (of OpenAI),” OpenAI writes in a post on its official Blog.
AI security has been a giant issue at the corporate. Kolter's appointment comes months after several distinguished OpenAI executives and employees focused on security, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, left the corporate. Several of those resignations got here from Sutskever's former “Superalignment” team, which focused on ways to regulate “superintelligent” AI systems but was denied access to the computing resources it had originally promised, in response to one source.
Kolter can even join the OpenAI board's Security Committee, which sits alongside directors Bret Taylor, Adam D'Angelo, Paul Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, CEO Sam Altman, and OpenAI technical experts. The committee is liable for making recommendations on security decisions for all OpenAI projects – but as we noted in an article in May, it’s made up mostly of insiders, raising doubts amongst experts about its effectiveness.
OpenAI CEO Taylor said in an announcement: “Zico brings deep technical understanding and a perspective on the protection and robustness of AI that may help us be certain that general artificial intelligence advantages all of humanity.”
Kolter, formerly a senior data scientist at C3.ai, received his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT from 2010 to 2012. His research focuses on how existing AI safeguards may be circumvented using automated optimization techniques.
Kolter is conversant in industry collaborations and is currently “chief expert” at Bosch and senior technical advisor at AI startup Gray Swan.
