IBNS: Citing the pressure of his job and its impact on family life, OpenAI’s head of trust and safety Dave Willner has said he is quitting the company.
Dave wrote on his Linkdln profile: ” I’m proud of everything our team has accomplished in my time at OpenAI, and while my job there was one of the coolest and most interesting jobs it’s possible to have today, it had also grown dramatically in its scope and scale since I first joined.”
He said: ” As most of you know, both Charlotte Willner and I work in Trust & Safety. Transparently, the only way we make that work is by promising each other that nobody’s job comes ahead of our family’s needs. We work hard to strike that balance with each other, but in the months following the launch of ChatGPT, I’ve found it more and more difficult to keep up my end of the bargain.”
He said OpenAI is going through a high-intensity phase in its development.
Dave said: ” Anyone with young children and a super intense job can relate to that tension, I think, and these past few months have really crystallized for me that I was going to have to prioritize one or the other.”
” That moment of clarity allowed me to settle on a decision which probably feels counterintuitive to a lot of folks, but feels incredibly right for me. It ended up being a pretty easy choice to make, though not one that folks in my position often make so explicitly in public. I hope this post can serve to help normalize it,” he said.
He said: ” So, that’s that! I’ve moved teaching the kids to swim and ride their bikes to the top of my OKRs this summer.”
