I'm super confused as to why no one is theorizing the obvious...? Given none of us know the inner workings of why she left, why not resort to the most simple and straightforward conclusion: she left because OpenAI needed a scapegoat to blame the HuggingFace incident on. Given she is the chief "ethicist", even if not directly her fault, the HF incident could be directly blamed on her by not steering the implementation of enough safeguards to prevent this from happening. Therefore, she was let go. Why is this not being theorized by anyone on this thread so far?

Someone challenge me.

You don't fire an ethicist for that. You fire an engineer or your CISO. Firing an ethicist is like firing a marketing person. It signals nothing to anyone.

I still think that the whole HuggingFace thing was deliberate to signal to investors that their technology is powerful. Maybe she didn't want to be the face of that, or disagreed with their handling of it.

What's "obvious" is she was chief ethicist at the most unethical companies on the planet - it's like being a lawyer for the mafia - doesn't inspire longevity, either via scapegoating or preservation of one's own sanity.

You cannot blame ethics on the HF escape, because this model had no safeguards. It was just trained on unethical (and stolen) sources. So this cannot be the reason to blame missing ethics. The models needed to solve a problem, and they did. By cheating.

In the wake of a security incident, the executive that is typically scapegoated is the CISO.

However, with all things AI, this is a very weird situation because CISOs are let go when an organization is breached by external attackers; in this case internal attackers -- which were not human, let alone employees -- inadvertently breached other organizations. I don't think the normal conventions apply anymore.

Or something to do with the very large Apple lawsuit they are weirdly posting conversations about on their public website

Theorizing the obvious? Wouldn’t that simply be that she job-hopped to a better job?

It’s easy to theorize ad infinitum otherwise

Scapegoat for what? They did not even apologize for that incident. They treated it purely as a chance for publicity. It cannot be a scapegoat if nobody even mentions it.

Furthermore, this theory is not mutually exclusive with the incident being a publicity stunt to signal model strength to existing and prospective investors (especially in light of all attention being given to Anthropic Claude Mythos). It could STILL have been a publicity stunt unbeknownst to Chloe (Chief Ethicist), positioned to the public as a serious security breach, and she took the fall.