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Hayden Field

Hayden Field

Senior AI Reporter

Senior AI Reporter

Hayden Field is the senior AI reporter at The Verge, where she leads coverage of the biggest names in AI — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and others — while also reporting on how these tools are being used, their societal implications, and how regulators are responding. Prior to The Verge, Field was the AI beat reporter at CNBC, where she covered the industry’s shifting power dynamics, employee concerns within AI giants like Google, Amazon and OpenAI, Sam Altman’s ouster, FTC inquiries into top tech companies, and the AI arms race at large. Signal: haydenfield.11

More From Hayden Field

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Musk left the country with President Trump despite a judge’s orders.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge presiding over Musk v. Altman, had told Musk when he left the stand that he was not excused from the trial and that he was still under “recall status,” meaning he should stay nearby and ready to testify. But he’s currently in Beijing

Elon Musk’s post

[X (formerly Twitter)]

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
We’re listening to an expert witness, David Hemel, a law professor at NYU.

He said that “for a large nonprofit organization, having for-profit affiliates is very much the norm.” When asked, he also said that oftentimes, the for-profit affiliate of a nonprofit is “quite large compared to the nonprofit,” and he gave the Mozilla Corporation (which owns the Firefox web browser) and the Mozilla Foundation as an example. Hemel also testified that he’s getting paid $1,750 an hour to be here.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
During Elon Musk’s all-hands Q&A before departing OpenAI, Achiam said he felt Musk wanted to “race towards AGI.”

He said Musk was concerned about Google DeepMind and CEO Demis Hassabis and “expressed a lot of concerns about what would happen if DeepMind got to AGI first.” Achiam said he shared his concern that trying to “race” towards the technology was a “fairly unsafe proposition … He was proposing to do something that seemed … obviously unsafe and reckless.”

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Ilya Sutskever would get up on tables to give speeches in the early days of OpenAI.

That’s according to Josh Achiam, currently the company’s chief futurist, who joined in 2017. He said Sutskever’s impassioned speeches would typically be about the science-fiction-esque future that was approaching.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Achiam talked about the roles of Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever in OpenAI’s early days.

He said Brockman and Sutskever were the “main leaders,” and that Brockman was the “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” Achiam called Sutskever a “scientific visionary” who articulated what the future would be like, such as football fields of silicon chips making large-scale calculations.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Josh Achiam described what it was like to work at OpenAI in 2017.

He said when he joined, OpenAI was a team of about 50 people, and that it essentially felt like “an extension of a graduate student lab in a university” — a “collegiate, academic, super intellectual” environment — with most employees being either current PhD students or recent graduates. He said he appreciated that there wasn’t a “publish or perish” type of culture at the time.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Anthropic is launching Claude for Small Business.

It’s a package of “connectors,” installed via a toggle switch, that allows Claude to work inside tools like Intuit Quickbooks, PayPal, Docusign, HugSpot, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. “It can plan payroll, close the month, run a sales campaign, chase invoices, and more,” per Anthropic’s blog post.

Live updates from Musk v. AltmanLive updates from Musk v. Altman
Elizabeth Lopatto and Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Hayden Field
About 200 people work on safety at OpenAI.

Kolter laid out OpenAI’s different safety groups: the safety systems team, which works on guardrails and evaluations; the preparedness team, which deals with OpenAI’s preparedness framework; the alignment team, which helps train models on ways that “align with human values”; the model policy team, which develops the model spec; and other teams focusing on investigations. When speaking about the controversial dissolution of OpenAI’s superalignment team and AGI readiness team, he said some of that research is being done by other teams.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
The chair of OpenAI’s safety and security committee said they’ve formally delayed its model releases.

Dr. Jeremy “Zico” Kolter said that so far, there have been two times when the committee “formally requested a delay of models.”

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