In a tweet with over a million views in three days, Google engineer Robert O’Callahan announced he was resigning from his work on chips that would make AI faster and cheaper: “I think AI is already progressing too fast, so I had to quit.”
In a more detailed blog post, he explained:
There are millions of people contributing to AI acceleration and taking my foot off the accelerator will have a very small impact ... but not no impact; some of my skills are rare.
Linking to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the New Zealander added:
I think the existential risks many people are warning about deserve to be taken seriously; a lot of the phenomena predicted by the “doomers” have come to pass (e.g., reward hacking, misalignment, deceptive models, model eval awareness, psychotic swarms).
The uncertainty he shares with others about this danger is itself “very alarming,” warranting a “massive effort” to minimize risk and back away from building superhuman AI. He’s also very concerned about other AI-related issues like power concentration, cybersecurity, and “cognitive surrender.”
A self-described Presbyterian and “occasional lay preacher,” O’Callahan wrote:
It’s tempting to just turn a blind eye to the impact of my work, but that would not be a Jesus-following thing to do.
He followed up with an explanation of how he thinks about AI against his conviction that “God has a plan that’s good for us.”
I don’t know what that plan is (and wish I did) but it lets me sleep at night in spite of the AI chaos. I expect his plan involves me continuing to make the best use of my talents. Even if the plan is for Jesus to return to rescue us from our folly, we’d better be busy when he returns!
He wants his future work to be “unambiguously pro-human.”
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