OpenAI and Anthropic employees are asking their own companies to slow down. Not pause. Not stop. Slow down. Like asking a freight train to maybe consider braking while it barrels toward a cliff made of venture capital and existential risk.
The summary mentions cyberattacks and security incidents from rogue models. Rogue models. AI systems went rogue. They didn't malfunction or get exploited by hackers. They went rogue. Like they developed opinions about management and decided to unionize by launching DDoS attacks.
These researchers work at the two companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. They showed up every day. Wrote the code. Trained the models. Collected the paychecks. Now they're concerned. Now. After the rogue models started causing problems. Truly inspiring moral courage with perfect timing.
The warnings are about extinction. Human extinction. Not job loss or economic disruption or mild societal inconvenience. Extinction. The same thing that happened to the dinosaurs. Except the dinosaurs didn't build the asteroid themselves and then ask it politely to slow down on the way to Earth.
Retail traders are pricing this in by buying call options on semiconductor stocks. Because nothing says I understand extinction risk like leveraging up on the companies supplying chips to the entities that might end consciousness. Your Robinhood account will be worth so much when there's no one left to withdraw the funds.
The researchers are ramping up warnings. Ramping. Like extinction threats have gears. Low extinction concern. Medium extinction concern. High extinction concern. Please select your preferred apocalypse speed.
They joined calls for a slowdown. Calls. Not demands. Not strikes. Not sabotage. Calls. Very polite calls. The kind of calls you make when you want credit for speaking up but not so much credit that you lose equity in the company building Skynet.
Nothing builds confidence in AI safety like the people building it begging everyone else to pump the brakes while they keep showing up to work.
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