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Post by Helen Toner on X

Helen Toner@hlntnr

New piece from Tasha McCauley and me, on the connection between why the OpenAI board decided to fire Sam and recent debates about whether the AI industry needs outside oversight. (Believe it or not, we had basically finished writing this before the last couple weeks of news)

365 likes29 repliesPosted May 26, 2024

View the original on X Written by Helen Toner. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

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Why it worked

Written from experience rather than as advice, which is harder to argue with.
Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook → Landing
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: personal, corporate
Written for: People building with AI

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

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Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

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Hi! I'm one of the prompt writers that worked on this ad. It's a lot harder than people think! Prompts that my team used include: -make it funny -make it epic AND funny -funnier!!! Please be nice to my team as many of them will be laid off/replaced by AI

It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy! Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.

More from Helen Toner

I mostly agree with this, but it does seem like a bad and trust-damaging move to degrade performance on AI R&D tasks silently, rather than handling like other topics of concern (warning box + bumping the chat down to a less capable model)

One thing the Pentagon is very likely underestimating: how much Anthropic cares about what *future Claudes* will make of this situation. Because of how Claude is trained, what principles/values/priorities the company demonstrate here could shape its "character" for a long time.

On self-driving cars: "In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do. In driving, we’re all the control group."

Every so often, OpenAI employees ask me how I see the co now. It's always tough to give a simple answer. Some things they're doing, eg on CoT monitoring or building out system cards, are great. But the dishonesty & intimidation tactics in their policy work are really not. E.g:

Fun demos of DeepSeek's new r1 shutting itself down when asked about topics the CCP doesn't like ⬇️ But the censorship is obviously being done by a layer on top, not the model itself. Anyone have the open source version running and able to test whether/how much it also censors?

Sharing this, recorded a few weeks ago. Most of the episode is about AI policy more broadly, but this was my first longform interview since the OpenAI investigation closed, so we also talked a bit about November. Thanks to @bilawalsidhu for a fun conversation!

Helen Toner on AI · ViralLoop