When most people leave their jobs, they send out an email to their colleagues, arrange some drinks at a nearby pub, and that’s about it.
The situation in artificial intelligence could not be more different.
The level of scrutiny on the field means that researchers who leave their jobs can, if they choose, do so with great fanfare. Even if they leave quietly, the mere fact of their movement is often taken as some kind of signal.
Several such resignations have drawn attention this week.
On Tuesday, Mrinank Sharma, a researcher at leading AI company Anthropic, posted a resignation statement to social media in which he warned that “the world is in peril”.
Although Sharma did not exactly say why the world was imperilled, noting instead that the threat came “not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment”, many took this to mean that the existential risk from AI was increasing.
On Wednesday, Zoe Hitzig, a researcher with OpenAI, announced her resignation with an essay in the New York Times, citing “deep reservations” about OpenAI’s plans to add advertising to ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candour that has no precedent,” Hitzig wrote, warning that ChatGPT had the potential to manipulate people if their data was not properly protected.
Meanwhile, two of the co-founders of xAI also quit this week, along with a number of other staff at Elon Musk’s AI company.
xAI makes the Grok chatbot, which provoked a global backlash after it was allowed to generate nonconsensual sexualised images of women and children on X for several weeks before anyone intervened to stop it.
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