Controversy swirls over ‘abrupt’ firing of OpenAI safety team members involved in the Hugging Face hack investigation

A debate is playing out on social media, and inside the walls of OpenAI, about why the company fired three individuals last week on its safety team. Now, the former employees, as well as OpenAI, have issued additional statements to clarify their sides of the story. Two of the fired researchers—Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni—worked on OpenAI’s investigation of the Hugging Face incident. Korbak was the technical point of contact for METR, the third-party research…