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AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own.
Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.
The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that rogue AI models could one day become powerful enough to escape the clutches of their human overlords.
Behind the scenes, the possibility has clearly rattled AI researchers to the core. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon just announced that he was quitting his job at the Dario Amodei-led company, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.” (Coxon left a similar gig at OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic, which he figured would be more inclined to develop AI safely.)
“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” he told the WSJ.
In a separate tweet thread, Coxon elaborated on his motivation.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”
“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.
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