Imagine social score and surveillance based on multi-modal LLM combined with military target selection and running politics via "AI". I'd quit too if I had to be complicit in that stuff. There's only so much ethical sabotage you can do.
Seems like wild speculation.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390831
Why give up your seat at the table?
Could be there's a lot these ex employees are not sharing...
From the business point of view, continuing to improve the goose that is laying the golden eggs makes sense, but as a researcher they might have already ended up seeing the limit of adding compute and data, and wanted to pivot. As someone who worked a mid level manager/engineer, I can understand the frustration involved in making the management level understand what's really happening on the ground level.
The article left the pretty strong impression OpenAI's leaders, especially Altman, are too busy trying to make money and amass power now to care about any long term risk, and that's reflected in their actions.