We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. To solve this problem within four years, we’re starting a new team, co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, and dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date to this effort. We’re looking for excellent ML researchers and engineers to join us.
TL;DR: OpenAI announces a new team dedicated for researching superintelligence
Maybe they just want to avoid punishment by an omniscient AI? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk