Being a pain in the ass to (or in) AI companies is a real job now | Rob Wiblin | 80,000 Hours

The 80,000 Hours podcast has published an episode hosted by Rob Wiblin under the title 'Being a pain in the ass to (or in) AI companies is a real job now.' The episode discusses work aimed at holding frontier AI companies to account. In the excerpt, Wiblin says that OpenAI recently fired three safety researchers: Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang. He describes the three as researchers focused on one of the company's stated top safety and alignment problems.

The excerpt does not give the date of the departures, the reasons OpenAI gave, or any comment from the company or from the three researchers. It also does not specify which of the company's stated safety and alignment problems Wiblin is referring to. The remaining detail in the excerpt is a list of organisations named in the discussion as relevant to this kind of work: the UK AI Security Institute, METR, Redwood Research, LawZero and Resolution.

The title frames the subject as a career, describing being a pain in the ass to AI companies, or inside them, as 'a real job now'. The excerpt does not state what roles the listed organisations offer, what work each does, or whether any of them employs the three researchers. Beyond the naming of the three researchers and the five organisations, the excerpt supplied contains no further reporting on the circumstances of the firings or on the remainder of the episode.