alt Hacker NewsGoodbye Google
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The only new thing (to me) was the observation that some of our societal timeframes (e.g picking a 4yr university degree) hinge on assuming a specific rate of societal change. If the rate of disruption exceedes that assumption, the timeframes become inadequate.
> AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.
Whether you agree or not with his decision, you gotta respect his integrity.
Why is uncertainty about the motives of one form of superintelligence terrifying, whilst, at the same time, uncertainty about the motives of another, omnipotent supernatural intelligence comforting? i.e. the “I don’t know God’s plan, but I sleep well knowing He has one” line of reasoning.
> I’m also very concerned about other AI-related issues: cognitive surrender, AI-induced psychosis and loneliness, power concentration, economic disruption, cybersecurity, lack of accountability, and so on.
I'm so bothered that we seem to have moved on from the ATTRIBUTION problem with LLMs. It just isn't on people's minds anymore, even tho it STILL is a big deal.
Sort of struggling to see an actual reason other than he doesn't like the pace of AI advancement? Also that his current job is very indirectly related to AI? Then somehow ties religion into it.
We had people departing from OpenAI, Anthropic and now Google. The pace the frontier open letter was signed by over 1,000 experts. At which point do we believe the message?
For a resignation letter that is unusually detailed w.r.t. "what comes next?" It may not be uncommon to write why you leave, but the rest of that text does not read like what you send to HR to quit but what you send to your (soon to be ex-)coworkers afterwards.
> I definitely want my future work to be unambiguously pro-human.
Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.
Well It seems like you may join us in our goal: Find a way to stop the progress or further development of it. Not that we are afraid, but we are fully aware of the progress escalation.
If you think humans are a net positive to be around, you wouldn't be spending trillions trying to build a machine to replace them; not just their work, but all aspects of their lives.
> I’m also very concerned about other AI-related issues: cognitive surrender, AI-induced psychosis
How's he so sure he's not already in both of these groups? His post about the AGI boogeyman sounds like it to me. Why is he bothering working on both of his projects if AGI is right around the corner anyways?
Congratulations and commiserations.
Perhaps a good thing to come out of these big companies over-indexing on "AI" is the liberation of creative minds. So many fantastic open source contributors have disappeared into corporate black holes...
Makes some important and objectively correct points and then completely blows any chance of looking sane or being taken seriously in the last paragraph. What exactly is your God forcing you to do, and how? Is the coming collapse not also part of his plan from your framework or is it only relevant when it's comforting?
> my team’s goal is ultimately to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and I don’t think that’s good for people right now
I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.
oh no, AI too powerful too quick. let me quit to work on tools to make AI better at debugging code.
excellent logic, m'lord.
As much as I cannot disagree more with the author's fundamental premise (religion), it is refreshing to see someone claim to have a belief and then follow through, change their behaviour to match their belief, at no small cost to themselves, and in pursuit of doing the right thing.
Is it consuming too much science fiction that has people thinking like this?
You'd think AI doomerism is a new breed, but it's just the latest revision—and a lower IQ one at that—of Ted Kaczynski.
Not full of himself at all
I for one cannot be convinced that these companies saying they want to slow down AI progress is for the safety of mankind (or any other altruistic reason). However, I respect someone willing to give up a very comfortable career for his convictions.
> I really enjoyed the work, and for a while I told myself it was relatively harmless, but over time God forced me to confront the reality that the main impact of these tools will be to accelerate the design of a new breed of AI chips...
There's no arguing with someone who claims God forced them to do something, but I do wish this person good luck in whatever they do next.
respect for choosing your faith over your work man! I'm trying to find the intersection of my faith and the new tech too. Feel free to email if you ever wanna chat it out.
Thanks for living your values. I might not fully agree but I appreciate people whose convictions are genuine and altruistic.
Sometimes people use the "Yet you participate in society" meme as a shield for blatant hypocrisy, like a Marxist-Leninist Twitch streamer who lives in a multi-million Hollywood mansion, drives a Porsche and wears thousand dollar pants.
"The most important thing I’m confident about is that the Jesus of the Bible is real and therefore God has a plan that’s good for us"
The post resonates with me and the author shows the way.
There are two major categories of AI doomerism.
The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.
The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:
1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or
2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.
I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.
We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.
The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.
And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.
So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.
[1]: https://www.military.com/history/russias-dead-hand-soviet-bu...
Yet another "AI must be stopped" post... If you're burned out, just say so. Don't philosophise. No, we're not buying that your latest model can almost replace all software engineers. It's us working with the harnesses, adding guardrails etc that make this agentic world possible for everyone.
Are fears of AI anti-intellectualism 2.0 ?
Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?
Does American anti-intellectualism explain the difference in perception of AI by Americans and Chinese?
Isn't AI just the next step in the history of evolution?
I have the feeling it is inevitable that a new species will take over Earth. Just as humans took over a hundred thousand years ago. Now a species even more capable of thinking is coming up.
Thinking a million times faster. Knowing a million times more. Able to wrap its head around a million times more aspects at the same time.
A strong effort to slow it down might slow it down a bit. But does that really make a difference? It's not like we can "brace" ourselves from what is coming. Would the apes have been able to prepare for the arrival of humans if they had had 5 more years?
There is a solution to this problem of "AI going to kill everyone".
- Create powerful AI but don't release it and keep it secret.
- Ask this AI to create some sort of virus that can be delivered to every human in the world without them knowing it and this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.
- Release this powerful AI to everyone.
Will that work?
The more people leaving 'because AI' just makes me sad that there have been so few leaving 'because advertising'.