In 2019, OpenAI decided not to publicly release a new model because its research uncovered “concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” And on Tuesday, the company announced it has built a kill switch for the models deployed in its research labs, months after some of them displayed disturbing behavior. “As our models get more powerful and the associated safety and security risks become bigger, it becomes more and more critical that we can detect potential issues, and quickly stop models in their tracks when needed,” OpenAI explains in a Tuesday post . The company named the kill switch “Control Room” and described it as “a central system to track model workloads across our research infrastructure and stop them quickly when safety or security concerns arise.” The facility can apparently stop models from producing any output 35 seconds after a decision to pull the plug – and can go faster. “The 35-second lag comes from a caching layer for inference authorization, to support the required volume of traffic. We are working to drive this number down to zero so that we can end jobs instantly,” the company promises…
