Zico Kolter, a seasoned professor of AI safety, joins OpenAI

Zico Kolter, a professor and head of Carnegie Mellon University's machine learning department, was added to the board of OpenAI, the AI startup backed by Microsoft, announced on Thursday.
As more companies scramble to implement the rapidly expanding technology, worries about the safety of generative artificial intelligence have led to many changes to the board of directors of ChatGPT.

Along with CEO Sam Altman and directors Bret Taylor, Adam D'Angelo, Paul Nakasone, and Nicole Seligman, Kolter, whose work primarily focuses on AI safety, will also join the OpenAI board's safety and security committee, the firm announced.
All of OpenAI's initiatives receive advice on safety and security matters from the safety committee, which was established in May.

As artificial intelligence (AI) models grow more sophisticated, safety concerns have been raised by OpenAI's chatbots that possess genAI features, such as conversing like humans and producing visuals in response to text requests.

Kolter is presently the chief expert at Bosch and the main technical adviser at Gray Swan, a firm that specializes in AI safety and security. Kolter was previously the top data scientist at C3.ai.

Kolter demonstrated the ability to get beyond current model protections in 2023 by helping to develop techniques for automatically evaluating the safety of large language models, according to OpenAI's blog post.
In an effort to allay worries about its level of control over the startup with the growing use of genAI among US and UK antitrust regulators, Microsoft resigned its position as a board observer at OpenAI in July.