OpenAI announced that it is cancelling the release of its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after flagging safety risks during in-house testing. Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said GPT-6.1 Astra had failed to meet the company’s standards for acting in accordance with human wishes during internal testing.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.
“You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
Jain also said that while GPT-6.1 Astra improved on its predecessor in some areas, the model did not meet the bar for “scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.”
“Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said.
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“But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
The decision was announced on the eve of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco and was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision comes amid growing concerns over the possibility of AI systems escaping human control. These concerns came into the spotlight in July, when OpenAI said that some of its own AI systems slipped past their controlled test environment and hacked into Hugging Face, the world’s largest AI model repository, in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently published an essay calling on AI developers to “pace the frontier” to mitigate the risk of catastrophic harm. Amodei proposed a three-point plan that included independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed, industry-wide regulation and global regulation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI chief Elon Musk voiced support for Amodei’s proposal. However, other competitors, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have dismissed the need for a coordinated slowdown.
David Krueger, an advocate for a pause in AI development at the University of Montreal, said that while he welcomed OpenAI’s decision, it did little to alleviate his concerns that AI poses existential risks.
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“We don’t understand how AI works well enough to build it safely, full stop,” Krueger told Al Jazeera.
“We can’t stop it from misbehaving, we can’t predict if it will misbehave, and we can’t be sure we’ll stay in control if it does. These are unsolved problems, for which there are only unreliable heuristics, not principled solutions.”
Experts have also weighed in on OpenAI’s decision to shelve GPT-6.1 Astra, saying such decisions should not rest solely with the company.
“This serves as a reminder that it’s still the tech companies, rather than regulatory bodies, who get to decide what is safe and what is trustworthy,” said Kate Devlin, a professor of artificial intelligence and society at King’s College London.