One 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it.The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27-year-old, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, went public with an alarming allegation: That the people inside Silicon Valley’s leading AI companies truly believe their products might pose an extinction level threat to humanity. This claim isn’t exactly new. AI safety advocates, often dubbed doomers, have been saying this for over a decade. Coxon isn’t even the first AI researcher this year to quit and cite concerns.Yet Coxon’s post went obscenely viral. It has been viewed more than 170 million times on X—orders of magnitude more than the usual, wonky discussions of “misaligned” or runaway AIs. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely seen some version of a headline that asks Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All? The debate isn’t just online. It has roiled Washington D.C., activating figures as disparate as Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Inside AI companies, researchers echoed Coxon’s concerns, and the heads of every major AI company publicly expressed the need to “pace the frontier,” another way of saying that they ought to slow future development. In recent days, it has come to seem as if the media, Silicon Valley, and the entire internet are all trying to figure out just how dangerous AI might be.Here’s where I must admit: A big chunk of this conversation happened while I was on a (depending on whom you ask) poorly timed vacation. Dipping into my feeds before bedtime, I felt as if I was digesting a week’s worth of news every day—claims about the development of AI-designed viruses that could rip through the population were followed by horror stories of “rogue” agent swarms. Skeptics of the AI panic, meanwhile, said that the agent swarms were actually quite obedient and that any notion of an apocalyptic AI virus was laughable. One person’s concerns about models being self-aware were dismissed by another as “genuinely nonsensical anthropomorphization.”Ping-ponging between the doomers and the skeptics, I was struck by how certain so many people sounded about a deeply uncertain moment. With confident, self-described experts on all sides, it felt impossible to know whom to trust: Is this the end of the world as we know it, or a passing moment of anxiety about a powerful new technology? Maybe the truth of this… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
