> before this all comes crashing down

You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if what you are worried about is an economic crash from this not turning out

> move to somewhere else away from this mess

You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if you think there is anywhere you could move to run away from what you are worried about

Yeah. Let's say they regulate AI to oblivion to avoid dangers, perhaps crashing the economy in the short-term but assuring that no major catastrophe occurs.

All those who worked in AI still have the money they cashed out on, there might not be another opportunity to obtain generational wealth in such a short time again.

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Suspicious in that it's unlikely or suspicious in that it betrays their real motivation?

On the former: It kind of makes sense if they think they can convince regulators that they (and maybe a few select competitors) are the only ones who can keep AI in check. Regulation can work in their favor given how well they're established, financially, compared to the small upstarts they need to keep down.

On the latter: I agree, see above. Promoting the idea that AI can or will kill us all, but also that it can't be stopped except by them, puts them in a position (if they're successful in their persuasion) to get more financial benefits.

I am FAR more afraid of violent AI doomers and malevolent people powered by unaligned AI, than I am of violent (or even just extremely disruptive) AI. Remember Joseph from the movie "Contact"?

I still think that aligning AI is a fool's errand though.

It's mostly coming from two out of many American companies that happen to have the highest concentration of people from a very specific movement born in California long before the current AI wave. In fact Anthropic's entire internal culture was built around their views. The fact they operate massive amounts of money doesn't help.

Because they have the most advanced models.

They have the most creditors, we’re at the top of the S-Curve, and inference margins have a lot of room to contract (and it’s not obvious that A\ or OAI are competitive against DeepSeek in that domain).

Because Anthropic and OpenAI are the primary drivers of the AI space?

America is a stage for the world. Nobody knows or cares about drama happening in European tech companies.

I say this neither negatively or positively, it's just that US news is, for now, the only international news, in both tech and politics.

Every company that is not OpenAI or Anthropic is sufficiently behind the frontier to feel ethically shielded from the weight of advancing the frontier.

Capital concentration, they have access and lots of control over the media, their CEOs made themselves public personalities, they for some reasons decided to cosplay as Bond villains, they are linked to Trump (and lot of people hate Trump). Just a few reasons, I’m sure we can think of more

Recursive Self Improvement

Crazy that it's not defined anywhere in this post while also being an existing thing (Repetitive stress injury).

Clearly: Repetitive Strain Injury :D

Something we all suffer from in this industry !

Recursive Self Improvement

Deprive who of capital? The folks behind Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen, etc. or only the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI? You can wipe out the mosquitos around your house but if you don't get the entire neighborhood you may as well not bother.

> The best way to stifle AI growth would be to deprive the labs of capital, and yet these AI safetyists never seem to seriously attack the money side.

That's because you're up against billions if not trillions of dollars desperately searching for any kind of return on investment, and there aren't that many industries left now that China has everyone by the balls.

As much as I'd love to see some enforcement action before the AI bros turn the world into another horror show like 2007ff... it won't happen. And just like we didn't have any meaningful consequences back then, this time the ones responsible (hello Sam Altman) will get away scot-free as well.

"They" don't care about "fixing" the DMV. It's nice to think that "they would if they could" but in fact, the anti-government party actively cripples and dismantles government services so that people lose faith in government's ability to improve lives. And what would "fixing" it look like, anyway? Lower cost to operate or lower time-in-queue? Those are in conflict and as much as I would appreciate a better experience there when I have to go (once every 5 years), I think few people would be willing to pay $X/year for that.

On the other hand, my personal computer setup is better than it's been in a long time. Other peoples' software that I run has not improved much, but I've managed to fix several long-standing issues by just giving Fable access to my configuration and telling it my intent.

I've also vibe-coded several applications which are lighter-weight versions of things like Pinboard, Descript, and Weechat. I'm not releasing them because I've been doing OSS for 10 years and I've felt first-hand how the economics of open-source is skewed. And in this day and age where anyone can vibe up their own custom app, it doesn't feel worth it anymore.

What this tells me is that there's not proper incentive for the software you use to get "better" according to your values. You have implicit metrics of "cleanliness", "minimalism", "anticipatory design", and I share those values, but having worked as a SWE for 30 years, I have never worked for a corporation which encouraged those values. If I managed to inflict them on the corporate software I created, it was a "yes and" situation and I only did it because I (or other engineers) cared, never because management wanted it.

So the problem is not "AI is failing us" but rather "the system is failing to use these awesome tools to improve our lives". We can use AI to try to improve the system itself, but our system is not a github repo you can deploy to prod. It's a bit trickier to vibe up the improvements to our incentive structure (though I am trying to do it a bit myself).

Internal tooling is basically free. You may not care, but for me that’s a big deal. I don’t have to spend 6 months negotiating with an internal software team to build a trivial plugin that saves me a few hours a week. I ask the genie, and I get it for a couple dollars.

The only improvement I’ve seen is speed of development, but it’s come at the cost of quality. Hence pretty much every single piece of software a consumer uses becoming significantly worse over the past two years.

It’s especially worsened by every leader doing their damndest to force something related to AI into their workflows and products, regardlesss of if it’s a good fit, lest their own leaders or investors decide they are dinosaurs who need to be replaced.

I'm pretty skeptical as well. As soon as I saw his interview on NBC News last night I texted a friend that this guy is about to get a $500 million seed round for an AI alignment startup.

The entire interview he's just grinning like he has the "answer" to all these companies he alleges don't take safety seriously.

What is your source for 6 weeks? I see since 2024

Which makes you question if this was the plan all along or he was totally naive not to think this though. Imagine if he did this with Aylo (formerly known as MindGeek) :)

Yeah 2 vague articles from 1 guy isn't a "firestorm"

Jacob Coxon was at Anthropic since 2024, so more than 6 weeks.