The latest on AI panic — and whether it's justified
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Why are AI companies calling for an industry‑wide slowdown?
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AI. It's everywhere. It's being pushed on our phones. It's summarizing our text messages, our emails. And it is revolutionizing science. We've talked to biologists using it to create new viruses, to scientists using it to make the military more efficient. I've even talked to conservationists using it to detect the sounds of invasive bullfrogs.
But in recent days, AI is making headlines for a different reason. The leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the top companies, are now calling for the industry to collectively slow down development of most advanced AI through international cooperation or through government regulation to make the system safer.
Yeah, the statements came after a researcher at Anthropic recently resigned publicly, Jacob Coxon, in a series of viral posts to social media. He said that neither company is acting responsibly and that they're, quote, gambling with our lives. Jacob talked to our colleague Scott Detrow about why he thinks this could happen.
Mostly the rapidly accelerating capabilities of these AI systems. So they're getting a lot faster very quickly, combined with the fact that we don't yet know how to safely control them. And we don't yet know whether that problem will be solved in time if we keep racing.
Jacob said in his post that AI can get so capable that it can, quote, hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources, unquote. And when an AI that capable spins out of human control, Jacob worries that it may spell the end of humanity. He said, by the end of the decade.
Yeah, and I'm sure as you know, as one of NPR's reporters covering AI, Huo Jingnan, less than two hours later, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's lead alignment scientist, basically the guy leading the internal push to make AI more ethical, replied to Jacob's quote and said, yeah, quote, Jacob is correct here. We do earnestly believe that AI could kill all humans, end quote. With a likelihood he thinks of, quote, greater than 10% within the next decade, end quote. As AI models continue to self-improve, we're not talking about current models.
The concerns or flavor of their concerns have been widely shared within the AI industry. Broadly speaking, people are concerned about very powerful AI systems spinning out of human control and wreaking havoc.
Yeah, people are throwing around the word extinction.
Right. But I wanted to stress that not everybody was talking about extinction. Not everybody agree with like these like precise timelines, like in a decade, within this decade or probabilities in percentages that Jacob and Evan have thrown out. Many have told me that, you know, we should view these precise numbers just as an opinion. And we don't really know how they came to these very precise looking numbers. And, you know, predicting the future that precisely is really hard. Regardless, many in this industry are very concerned about safety not catching up with capability in AI right now.
Which I don't know how this all strikes you, but it does kind of really freak me out in a new sort of way.
I got to say I was a little freaked out even before that because I was digging into the hugging phase incidents this summer. And so when Jacob's post went out and before it went mega viral, I looked at it and I was like, yeah, that's basically what all my sources are telling me. Old
news.
Old news. Aside from maybe the fact that, you know, Jacob worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, that's kind of interesting. I didn't really expect it to lead to such an impact.
What did Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon say that sparked the panic?
But I was at this convening with lots of people in the AI safety field on Tuesday, and they were amazed and energized at how their longstanding concerns have all of a sudden captured public attention and that the leading AI companies are responding.
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