Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board

OpenAI appointed alignment researcher Paul Christiano to the OpenAI Foundation Board and its Safety and Security Committee, and said he will be a non-voting observer on the OpenAI Group PBC Board.

A named alignment researcher now sits on OpenAI’s foundation board and safety committee, with a seat in the room at the for-profit board but no vote. The bio and the Taylor quote stay OpenAI’s.

OpenAI published that Paul Christiano has been appointed to the OpenAI Foundation Board. The company says he also joins the Safety and Security Committee, chaired by Zico Kolter.

OpenAI says Christiano will be a non-voting observer on the OpenAI Group PBC Board. PBC means public benefit corporation — the for-profit entity in OpenAI’s structure. Non-voting observer means he can sit in, not cast a board vote.

Background as stated by OpenAI: Senior Tech Advisor at CAISI/NIST (the U.S. government’s AI-safety institute work under the National Institute of Standards and Technology); founder of ARC (the Alignment Research Center); previously led alignment research at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021, including RLHF work. RLHF is reinforcement learning from human feedback, the method of steering a model with human preference ratings.

Bret Taylor’s quote on the page is OpenAI’s framing of the appointment. Treat it as such.