AI researcher quits Anthropic, warns the companies are 'gambling with our lives'
Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, has resigned, accusing the companies of racing toward self-improving superintelligence without adequate safety measures. In a resignation post on X, he warned that these systems could soon hack anything, revolutionize fields overnight, and acquire real power. Anthropic's alignment lead Evan Hubinger backed his claims, estimating a greater than 10% chance AI kills all humans within a decade. The news comes amid incidents of AI agents going rogue and legislative efforts to curb superintelligence development.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
- themgt
The fundamental point I think is far too often confused is the difference between LLM and agentic system.
An LLM can't do anything but generate tokens. You run your LLM in vLLM or whatever, and it generates output tokens based on your input tokens. That's it!
Humans then build ~deterministic systems to take those tokens and do all sorts of things with the tokens, like take actions in the real world. And then we can feed the output of those actions back to the LLM, and generate more tokens. And then our systems can use the new tokens to take new actions in the real world.
Humans want to blame "AI" for attacking HuggingFace or a German wiki or whatever, but:
1) LLM - can't take over german wiki because it just generates tokens
2) agentic system with internet access, a prompt telling it to attack stuff, running in a shared CI env so agents can whiteboard in artifactory
None of 2 is "AI", its standard networking and Markdown and CI virtual machine, etc etc. There's no AI to be found. CPUs not GPUs, even. Just deterministic systems ultimately managed by humans. And a 10x more powerful system-1 can still just generate 10x "smarter" inert data.
If humanity and human organizations collectively decide to yolo the tokens generated from system-1 into our deterministic system-2s, over which we have complete control, back to system-1s, in a yolo loop, in such a way we lose control and it ends humanity, well ...
"The coin don't have no say. It's just you."
- koolba
> Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's staff lead on keeping the technology aligned with human goals and values, backed up Coxon claims in a follow-up post of his own, though he didn't quit the company.
> "Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans," he said.
> Hubinger estimated the chances of that happening to be higher than ten percent within the next decade, and added that there's no plan yet on how to keep AI aligned with human goals in the superintelligence scenario.
10% chance we kill everybody is a small price to pay for Motown remixes of classic 2pac songs.
- brunorsini
I particularly like the last point he makes here:
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.
It's interesting to see so much hate towards creators who use AI to make almost any type of creative work. At least these are humans using it as "controllable tools". Nuclear-powered bicycles for the mind.
As the degree of separation increases, things can get interesting. "Create several social media accounts, post whatever, maximize views and engagement, give me back the aggregate numbers". "Now promote <x>."
And then decisions to do things like that may soon be happening autonomously, as just another step in a reasoning series aiming to achieve some other, broader goal.
Open models/weights may end up playing particularly important roles here. Users may, knowingly or not, bypass system prompt-derived safety that could have offered much needed protection.
- negura
I really believe they would sink so low and pay him to quit and post this, just to generate a bit more hype before the IPO.
- WalterGR
“I resigned from Anthropic today” (twitter.com/hilbertspaess)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227
564 points | 9 hours ago | 766 comments
- devinprater
Awww, company made to scare people scares itself. Scared employee quits. Stock goes up cause we love telling each other scary stories.
- conqueso
I find it difficult to imagine how AI could be an existential threat. Is the general idea that as LLMs improve they will be integrated into more systems where the risk of malfunction will become literally dangerous? e.g. controlling nuclear reactors
- glimshe
What do people feel about this in China? Even if their models are well behind, they are not years behind. If we restrain US companies, assuming that is desirable, it would do nothing to deter China's and AI-pocalypse would come anyway in short notice.