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 pornographic images of women and children on X for several weeks before anyone intervened to stop it.
X has since said it has made major changes to its AI chatbot Grok.
Put together, these departures were taken by many to signal that – in the words of an essay about AI which gained traction this week – “something big is happening”.
Media reports and social media posts described the resignations as a “wave”.
On closer inspection, however, the moves have little in common. Sharma was resigning for vague reasons to do with “values” in order to write poetry.
Hitzig – who is also a poet – has deep concerns about advertisements and user data.
The employees who left xAI did not go into detail about their reasons for leaving, although the recent changes at the company, which is due to merge with Musk’s space firm SpaceX, may have played a role.
The concerns raised by Hitzig and Sharma are widely shared, not least by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI”, who left his role at Google in order to warn that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.
File pic: Reuters
Perhaps the other reason these statements have attracted so much attention now is that they tap into fears about the rapid growth of AI, which has made stunning strides in recent months, especially in software development.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times on Wednesday he believed that most tasks performed by white-collar workers, such as lawyers and accountants, would be fully automated in 12 to 18 months, describing the progress in recent years as “eye-watering.”
Many senior figures in AI have made similar warnings.
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Whatever the motivations, the feverish atmosphere around AI could be contributing to the exits, according to Dr Henry Shevlin, Associate Director at Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
“Walkouts from AI companies are nothing new,” Dr Shevlin told Sky News. “But why are we seeing a wave right now? Part of it is illusory – as AI has become a bigger deal, AI walkouts have become more newsworthy, so we observe more clusters.
“However, it’s fair to say that as AI becomes more powerful and more widely used, we’re facing more questions about its appropriate scope, use, and impact.
“That is generating heated debates both in society at large and within companies and may be contributing to a higher rate of concerned employees deciding to head for the exit.”
Anthropic declined to comment, pointing only to a tweet from a member of staff thanking Sharma for his work.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
