Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's warning that artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy humanity has been met with scepticism by some in Silicon Valley. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Coxon, a 27-year-old who worked at OpenAI before joining its chief rival Anthropic, said on Tuesday that people building AI believed the technology could destroy humanity. They are "gambling with our lives", he said, "these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything".
Coxon is by no means the first AI insider to publicly sound the alarm. There have been a string of high-profile resignations from both Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years over apparent safety concerns, and some current Anthropic employees even echoed Coxon's post. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade," a team lead at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, posted on X.
While Coxon said explicitly in his posts that his warnings were "not marketing", some executives and investors in Silicon Valley have reacted with scepticism to a recent flurry of insiders sounding the alarm. Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for potentially record-setting initial public offerings, and some in the tech sector have suggested the latest stark comments about the dangers of AI may be designed to generate hype by signalling the power of these products.
Anthropic's boss, Dario Amodei, has come under fire for saying AI technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and will "test who we are as a species". One conference speaker, Grindr chief executive George Arison, told the BBC he believed this week's comments from Coxon and others were indicative of an "anti-civilisational worldview at Anthropic". He called them "dangerous" and said they had prompted him to instruct some engineers at the LGBTQ+ dating app to stop using Anthropic's technology.
"It is irresponsible for us as stewards of our shareholders' money to be relying on a business that does what this company does, in terms of its public statements," he said. "Maybe they actually believe it," Arison said. "Or you could argue they're saying it because it's a great way to gin up more investor support, because the only way to justify these valuations is to actually claim: 'I'm going to take over every industry and I'm going to take over every job, and my AI is going to be doing all that work.'" Anthropic was valued at $965bn (£713bn) in its most recent fundraising round earlier this year. The BBC has asked Anthropic for a response to the statements.
In an essay posted early on Saturday, Amodei called for a slowing of AI model development and global regulation - and said the risks associated with AI were "serious". Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also discussed Coxon's comments before a crowd at the conference, multiple people in the group told the BBC. They said he dismissed them as untrue. Huang has previously said the notion that AI "is going to be the end of humanity" is "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.
Some critics have even accused Anthropic of fearmongering in hopes that it will trigger a regulatory push that could shut out competition and leave it and OpenAI with a duopoly in the sector. Brad Gerstner, who is the head of the investment firm Altimeter Capital, posted pictures of Huang from the conference and accused Coxon of "ridiculous hyperbole". On Friday, chief executive of AI platform Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, weighed in. Hugging Face, which Nvidia announced it would acquire last week, was hacked by OpenAI agents earlier this year prompting an outcry over AI safety. "Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change," he wrote on X. "Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let's keep things in perspective." Both Gerstner and Delangue were more circumspect on Saturday after Amodei's proposal was posted, with Gerstner calling the idea "an important step forward" in balancing competing considerations like speed and safety. Delangue offered to help be a part of the potential solutions proposed by Amodei. In April, Anthropic roiled the AI world when it said it found that its Mythos tool could outperform humans at some hacking and cybersecurity tasks.