The Great AI Freakout Has Begun
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It's been a wild few days in the world of AI. At first, things started out on a high.
Yeah, I mean early in the week, last week, there was euphoria at OpenAI.
That's our colleague Bob McMillan, who covers technology. OpenAI had said it'd solve this so-called Millennium Prize math problem.
This mathematical prize that was considered just a few years ago something that'd be unattainable by an AI system. And it was yet another of these sort of magical breakthroughs that AI systems seem to be achieving at a very regular pace. You know, here here's another example of this new age of amazing breakthroughs that we're in. And then came Tuesday.
On Tuesday, over at Anthropic, a researcher named Jacob Coxson quit. And posted on X that he was quitting because he was worried about how powerful artificial intelligence had become.
He walked away from one of the greatest jobs in Silicon Valley. And he did it because he he said he thought the products he was working on could kill everyone.
Kill everyone. Coxan said that anthropic and open AI are moving too fast and quote, gambling with our lives. Then on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amade said the industry did need to slow down. And by the end of the weekend, leaders at other major AI companies, including Sam Altman at Rival OpenAI and Elon Musk, agreed.
If you roll the clock back one year, it's incredible all of the things that AI has been able to achieve. Like a year ago, I would have told you that these AI systems, you know, if you'd kind of jerry-rig them, they could maybe do some interesting stuff, but like mostly they were just overwhelming people with slop. And now We're talking we're talking about like fully autonomous systems hacking real world companies and the people who administer these systems not even knowing it's happening. Like that's a plot that's ripped from science fiction and it seemed like an impossibility a year ago.
Mm-hmm. Do do you feel like we've reached an inflection point? With AI, a breaking point in some sense.
Well I mean in some domains, yeah, we ha we have. And I think what's really going on is that the AI systems are improving at a pace that is scary to a lot of people. So it's not so much an inflection point, it's that We're not seeing a deceleration of these improvements, and the improvements are passing these milestones that that have people very scared.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, September 14th. Coming up on the show, the week that AI fears went into overdrive.
There are basically two things that have everyone so freaked out about AI right now. The first is that AI models are getting better at an extremely rapid pace. And they're starting to be able to improve themselves with very little help.
So in the spring, both OpenAI and Anthropic talked about how their models were getting very good at this thing called recursive self improvement, which means fixing and improving themselves with no or very little human intervention. So this is kind of like um you know, if you think about like human evolution that you know, it takes billions of years and we we evolve, we change, we get smarter. This is happening with AI systems in the lab, like at lightning speed. And they're doing it themselves. The
the AI uh systems are essentially training themselves and saying, Oh, they here's how they can get smarter and they they can work so much faster than than we can.
Yeah, they're machines, you know, and they don't sleep and they can move very fast and so they could improve themselves in in ways that might seem very, very quick and seem very, very scary. Now that's a thing that the AI labs were aware of. Then there's the thing they were not aware of, and that is the hacking, all the hacking. OpenAI says that an advanced autonomous AI agent went rogue, escaped a controlled testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another artificial intelligence company.
In July, an open AI model hacked another AI company called Hugging Face.
This is the first major example that we've seen of an AI model independently conducting a hack outside of human control.
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