Somebody was bound to sound the alarm eventually. In this case it was a young British artificial intelligence researcher called Jacob Coxon, who quit his job at the AI company Anthropic to warn the world that “if we don’t slow down the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the next two years.”
“It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who are involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction,” Coxon said. And the floodgates opened.
On September 8, Coxon posted his message on as many sites as possible (and also got ten friends to retweet them), but he probably needn’t have gone to all that trouble. The AI community was ready to hear that news, and four days later his former boss Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, tacitly agreed.