An artificial intelligence researcher who quit AI firm Anthropic has said people working on the technology were "genuinely frightened" about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity. "I believe that if we don't slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future," Jacob Coxon told the BBC after his resignation post on the dangers of AI went viral amid growing safety concerns about the industry.
The 27-year-old's former boss, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, recently called for AI development to slow down - though some have questioned the motivations behind this. The bosses of two rival AI firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI, have both said they agree with Amodei's proposal for industry-wide deceleration and regulation, as well as independent monitoring of AI model development. Amodei wrote in an essay on Saturday that developing the technology was not in question, but the risks associated with it were "serious", and that companies and governments must be given time to address them.
Coxon – who worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic – welcomed the suggestion of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China to avoid "a race at an international scale". "The people who work at these companies are completely serious when they ask for regulation because they find themselves trapped in a race. And they're scared of the outcomes of that race," he told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
The hardest question to answer, according to Coxon, was what an AI apocalypse would look like. One of the risks outlined in Amodei's comments was of a swarm of bots acting like a supercomputer that could take over the internet. Coxon said this scenario could be realistic in six months to a year. In response to Coxon's departure, an Anthropic spokesperson told BBC News: "We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks. To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry." The firm has been a pioneer in studying how AI models work, the spokesperson added. It was the first to publish a framework for mitigating the risks posed by their development - and it also "aggressively" tests its models and publishes the findings to aid scrutiny and prevent incidents of "AI misalignment". "This work is also why we believe the world would benefit from the industry adopting a lawful, verifiable way to work together to pace how we release powerful models," they said.
Coxon said his peers feared the danger could even arrive in the next two years. He said staff at AI firms were "planning what to do with their lives and thinking about the impacts of their work", while some were "considering buying land somewhere because they're so scared of the instability as a result of rapid AI progress". "They all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology." But Coxon did have some optimism about the future of AI, telling the BBC that the people researching the technology "genuinely want to see the upside" of things like "solving diseases and improving everyone's lives".
Many others in the industry have also voiced their concerns since Coxon's social media post, including Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade," Hubinger said. Computer scientist and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, known as the "Godfather of AI", told the BBC on Friday that a 10% chance of AI killing all humans was "not unreasonable". Meanwhile, Marc Warner, chief executive of AI safety firm Faculty, told the BBC's The World This Weekend that it was "extremely hard to place a probability" on AI killing all humans. "But it's important to recognise that these people are very sincere in what they're saying," he added, noting that the risks surrounding AI have been raised by the heads of several AI firms for years. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is a paid adviser to Anthropic, wrote in the Sunday Times that he too was worried about the risk of AI to humanity despite generally being optimistic.
However, some industry figures have suggested comments about the perils and power of AI may be designed to generate hype. Chief executive of the AI platform Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, said on social media: "Sorry, but asking Jacob [Coxon] about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let's keep things in perspective." After Amodei's essay was published, however, Delangue offered to help be a part of the potential solutions the Anthropic boss proposed. Meanwhile, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also discussed Coxon's comments at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs last week, multiple people in the group told the BBC. They said he dismissed them as untrue. Huang has previously said the notion that AI was "going to be the end of humanity" was "complete nonsense". And while he may have a business interest in an AI boom - Nvidia builds chips that power AI systems - his comments reflect a growing backlash in Silicon Valley to the existential warnings from current and former staffers. Other critics say Anthropic has been trying to trigger a regulatory push to block competition, leaving it and OpenAI in a duopoly. Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a potentially record-setting initial public offering on the stock market, allowing people to buy shares in its firm. OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852bn (£630bn), had been expected to do the same, but OpenAI's Altman said on Friday this would not happen this year, citing safety concerns.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk