Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
So far I like best that he was probably fired for not being enough of an AI doomer, i.e. deprioritizing AI safety and diverting too many resources from research to product service, all the while only paying lip service to the ea/rationalist orthodoxy about heading off the impending birth of AI Cthulhu.
Any remaining weirdness can be explained away by the OpenAI board being sheltered oddballs who honestly though they could boot the CEO and face of the company on a dime and without repercussions, in order to bring in an ideologically purer replacement.