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A British engineer from Anthropic, who has also worked for the past three years for OpenAI—the creator of the popular ChatGPT—has submitted his resignation in recent hours because he says both companies "are not acting responsibly" and are "playing with our lives."
Jacob Coxon, a software engineer identified by media outlets as one of the developers of GPT-4o and GPT-4.5, though without executive responsibilities, asserted in a thread on his X account that the people behind the exponential development of AI "believe it could kill us all by the end of this decade," because "there is no other human activity that poses this level of threat."
For the 27-year-old engineer, the power of the technology is being underestimated, but AI projects "will soon be superhuman systems that could hack anything, revolutionize all areas, and gain real power and resources."
In his view, there is an awareness of this reality at both OpenAI and Anthropic, but he sees a difference: the former "perhaps have not internalized the civilizational challenges deeply," while the latter understand them well but "are trapped in the race to be first," even when, in the most optimistic case, it is about arriving first "to act responsibly."
Coxon sees no other way out than coordination between the different AI projects and the companies involved in them, but feels it is not happening and therefore advocates for "costly actions, such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities," and asks AI researchers to reflect deeply on the issue.
"Do you want to power a superintelligent 'reinforcement learning' (RL in technical jargon) without a rigorous understanding of its mind?" he asks his colleagues in AI. "Are you going to put your heads down because 'it's happening anyway,' or use this moment to advocate for different conditions?" concludes Coxon in a thread that has already had enormous media repercussions.
Along these lines, Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic researcher, replied to Coxon's comments on X and clarified the engineer's discourse: "Jacob is right here; we really do sincerely believe that AI could kill all humans. Personally, I think it's more than 10% within the next decade."
Despite this, Hubinger considered that the risk from current models is low, although the worrying thing is "the superintelligence that emerges from recursive self-improvement (...) which is happening faster than we thought."
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Coxon is not the only researcher who has withdrawn from AI model development in recent years after warning of the dangers of this technological development.
This is the case of Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, who resigned from his position at Google in 2023 so he could criticize the risks of AI without corporate constraints.
It is also worth mentioning the open letter in which former OpenAI employees expressed their concern in 2024, highlighting their worry regarding the rapid development of AI and the absence of laws protecting whistleblowers.
[Publicidad]