Ryan Beiermeister, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of product policy, was fired in January after a male colleague accused her of gender discrimination, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” Beiermeister told the paper. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for comment and also contacted an email that appears to be associated with Beiermeister; neither had responded at the time of publication.
According to the newspaper’s report, Beiermeister was terminated after she expressed criticism of a planned ChatGPT feature called “adult mode”. The new mode would introduce erotica into the chatbot user experience. Fidji Simo, who serves as general manager of OpenAI applications — a role overseeing the company’s consumer-facing products — told reporters that the new feature is slated to launch in the first quarter of this year.
Beiermeister and others at the company expressed concerns about how the new “adult” feature could potentially affect some users, the report said.
OpenAI reportedly said that Beiermeister, who was fired after the leave, “made valuable contributions during her time at OpenAI and her departure was unrelated to any issue she raised during her time at the company.”
Beiermeister’s LinkedIn profile says she previously worked on the Meta product team for four years and worked for Palantir for more than seven years.