GoKawiilThe AI industry seems to be having its loudest debate yet about whether its technology poses an existential threat to humanity.
The current discussion began after AI researcher Jacob Coxon said that he’s resigned from Anthropic because he’s worried that the leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives.” Then Anthropic’s alignment leaned chimed in with a post declaring, “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” adding that he personally thinks the chance is “>10% within the next decade.”
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the latest apocalyptic warnings. I tried to articulate why I’m skeptical of many AI doomer narratives, while Kirsten asked if this was “just a weird way of flexing to show how far advanced their company’s AI model is,” particularly as these companies prepare to go public.
And Sean wondered how these concerns might show up in Anthropic’s S-1 filing for its IPO: “Are there junior lawyers right now who are going through and having to rewrite that entire section of the S-1 filing to say, ‘It’s a officially Anthropic’s position that there’s a more than 10% chance that we could develop something that would eradicate all of humanity and that would be materially bad for our business’?”
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. (Note: We recorded this episode before Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published his plan for more cautious AI development.)
Sean O’Kane: I’m hard-pressed to think of something that blew up so fast. Not only did this warning shot come out from this young researcher who has also worked at OpenAI, but also was immediately shared on X by the alignment lead at Anthropic — who, in what might go down as one of the best misplaced exclamation marks ever, shared Coxon’s post and and thread and said, “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Exclamation mark!
What a weird vibe. That was just a ton of accelerant on an already fraught post or series of posts. Coming after the Hugging Face hack from OpenAI’s internal model, plus just the increased capabilities we’ve seen with the latest models released by Anthropic and and now OpenAI with with Astra a few weeks ago, I think this was just perfectly timed to be a powder keg type of thing for this young researcher to say.
Anthony Ha: Just to disagree with you, I do think that if you believe that AI could destroy all humanity, that does deserve an exclamation point. I would argue that that is a perfectly well used exclamation point!
My issue with that tweet was more the “we.” Who is the “we” here? To what extent can we talk about sort of the AI community or AI research community as a monolith? And the greater than 10% chance — that’s just a made up number, that doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes [there is] this habit in both the tech industry and other places to just throw out these percentages, they’re not based on anything or calculated based on anything. [In retrospect, I realize the tweet was probably referencing the concept of P(doom), but I still think it’s silly.]
One thing I will say about Coxon’s statement and decision is — there’s this recurring theme on Equity, when someone like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei is doing this doomer narrative, there’s always this element of: Well, then, why are you doing what you’re doing? If you actually believe that [AI could destroy humanity], you would not continue doing this.
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