OpenAI Capabilities Researcher Dan Selsam Publishes Personal Statement on AI Risk
DKokotajlo · x · 2026-09-15
Dan Selsam, a capabilities researcher at OpenAI since 2022, has released a public personal statement on AI risk, shared on his behalf by a former colleague since he has no Twitter account.
- Background: 15+ years in AI — early probabilistic programming work at MIT, early development of the Lean Theorem Prover at Microsoft Research, and one of the first demonstrations of neural networks learning to reason during his Stanford PhD.
- At OpenAI: Nearly five years helping pioneer chain-of-thought optimization on language models, and more recently data-efficient pretraining methods.
- Statement: He says he has become extremely concerned about how far language models have come and the risks of future iterations (the post text is truncated; full statement at the link).
A rare public risk statement from someone on OpenAI's capabilities side.
Related event: OpenAI Researcher Dan Selsam Publishes Personal AI Risk Statement(26 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Kevin Roose's Machine Gods pod: why scientists are mad at OpenAI solving their hardest problems — kevinroose · 2026-10-30
- Cryptographer Matthew Green: Anthropic's agent worm framing is unhelpful, we need a simulated one to know — matthew_d_green · 2026-10-30
- Ethan Mollick on AI and work: 'You're a hand-weaver in a world of power looms' — emollick · 2026-10-30
- Vercel founder Rauch: trust is the deepest moat for a post-AGI business — soleio · 2026-10-30
- Scattered Across AI Assistants: A New Kind of Cognitive Failure Nobody Has a Prior For — manosaie · 2026-10-30
- a16z partners: 10-20M people drive $150-200B in token spend, and AI workspaces will eat the browser — petergyang · 2026-10-30