OpenAI responded to a sweeping multistate probe on Thursday by formally requesting that the investigating state attorneys general send back a summary of how the company's language models function once they figure it out.
OpenAI responded to a sweeping multistate probe by state attorneys general on Thursday by formally requesting that investigators share any information they might uncover about how the company's language models actually function.
The coalition of prosecutors issued demands for internal documents regarding OpenAI's training data, decision-making processes, and consumer safety protocols. In a filing with the court, the artificial intelligence giant agreed to hand over its entire proprietary architecture, noting that its own engineering team would be highly interested in reading whatever the states manage to decipher.
Chief Executive Sam Altman told investors on a morning call that the government probe represents a massive operational windfall, effectively replacing a costly internal audit with a taxpayer-funded discovery process. Altman noted that while OpenAI has raised billions of dollars to build artificial general intelligence, the company currently relies on a combination of server restarts and blind optimism to keep ChatGPT running.
We are complying fully with the attorneys general, primarily because we are hoping their forensic teams can finally explain why our flagship model spent three hours last week insisting it was a 19th-century whaler.
The attorneys general have specifically targeted the opacity of OpenAI's neural networks, demanding a step-by-step accounting of how the software generates its outputs. OpenAI's legal team has reportedly cleared a dedicated internal workspace for the investigators, urging the prosecutors to drop a message if they manage to locate the specific parameter weights that determine human values.
Markets reacted positively to the regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft, which holds a massive stake in OpenAI, saw its shares rise on the prospect that the attorney general of Texas might finally map out the GPT-4 training set for them.