De La Rosa asks Kim about XAI co-founder prioritizing unsafe models
De La Rosa thanks Kim and asks about a 2025 statement by an XAI co-founder that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one; Kim says early on he was told XAI could not focus on safety while losing to competitors, but after Grok 3 launched, safety hiring was still blocked.
Thank you, Speaker, and I want to agree with her.
It takes a lot of courage and bravery for you and your attorney to be here as well and really give us some insight into your experience, which is horrific.
I want to ask you, in 2025, one of AXI's co-founders indicated that he would rather, quote, release an unsafe model than a poor performing one.
Do you believe that that is still the priority for XAI in the development of their models?
I can't speak to the priority, but what I'm able to share is that,
especially in the early days of development, I was told that because the company was in a position where we were losing or had worse models than a lot of our competitors, it would be difficult for us to focus on safety.
And that once we were able to have a more competitive stance, then we would be able to focus more on safety.
And so at the time, that is a position that made sense to me and something that, you know, I really believed in.
And so myself and many other employees, you know, I think a lot of people want to have see the work have positive impact.
I think many people want to believe that they are the good guys.
And if they are the ones developing powerful AI, that they would be doing a better job or a more moral job than the others.
And so I think many people marched on with that belief.
However, in practice, I think what we saw, you know, after many, many months of sacrifice, I mean, personally, for me, I lived at the office for four months because I was
working at all hours of the day, including weekends, because I was so dedicated to the mission.
Once we launched Grok 3, which at the time was actually the most intelligent model in the world, and so powerful.
powerful and so surprising to many of our competitors that OpenAI reportedly declared a code red and sort of trying to understand how XA had caught up so quickly and trying to do something about the situation.
Even at that point, it was very difficult to advocate for safety.
Hiring for safety had count was being blocked.
And so I think that is the point at which many people started having the realization, oh, maybe what was sort of told to us before isn't actually the case.