He resigned and now what? There are thousands willing to do his role, and many labs are competing in that race.

His resignation and his statement doesn't do anything but buy him attention which is what all this post about in my opinion.

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jonhohle 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Dyson: That's right. There's no way I'm gonna finish the new <model>, not now. Forget it. I'm out of it. I'll quit <Anthropic> tomorrow.

> Sarah: That's not good enough.

> Terminator: No one must follow your work.

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entropyneur 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do your expect him to do? Blow up the office Miles Dyson style?

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lf88 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It seems that, at the very least, he's giving substantial resonance to the issue.

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qarl 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It buys attention for the issue. Many people (see other comments in this very post) refuse to believe these things.

And by resigning he no longer has to feel personally guilty for what happens.

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skeledrew 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

By resigning he's making room for someone with less moral scruples, or even just less awareness, to step in and continue the work without said scruples/awareness.

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hegelstoleit 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not necessarily true, and you can use that argument to justify doing any immoral job. Just because someone else might be willing to do it isn't a reason to continue doing it.

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skeledrew 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> not necessarily true

It's a possibility that is increased by their action. One leaves, a space is now open that will likely eventually be filled. And the chance of someone with equal/higher scruples filling it is very slim (unless you somehow know that the good amount of those who qualify and apply for the position have equal/higher scruples). That's just logic and math.

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hegelstoleit 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You missed the point.

> Just because someone else might be willing to do it isn't a reason to continue doing it.

Hence, someone filling the position after you leave isn't a reason to continue doing it, whereas the fact that it's an immoral thing to do is a reason to stop doing it.

Someone filling the position after you leave has no bearing on the reasons that are relevant to what you ought to do here. It's like deciding to not buy a ticket to see a movie because someone else is going to buy the ticket anyways even if you don't purchase the ticket. It has no relevance to whether you should watch the movie or not, just as someone else taking the job has no relevance to whether you ought to do the job.

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reasonableklout 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But organizations are made of humans. Jacob leaving might've moved some of his coworkers and his counterparts at OpenAI. And the same can be said for those who would fill positions at the frontier. Then finally there is a political component; his post went viral, 100K+ users appear to agree with it, and it is further fuel to the fire for regulation, which we already know most Americans want.

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skeledrew 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Others being moved to the point of also leaving would only worsen the effect. A viral post too can worsen the effect as it's now even less likely that someone with scruples who qualifies for the position(s) will apply. And those in it primarily for the money - and couldn't care less about the morals - will happily send in their CVs after becoming aware of the post.

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reasonableklout 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm utterly unconvinced. Others who are moved don't have to leave to effect change. And there's a very small pool of people on the planet who are at least as qualified as Jacob to work on pretraining at Anthropic. And when they'll join they'll have to ramp up. And you haven't addressed any of the positive effects of virality.

	▲	skeledrew 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, others don't have to leave. Will Jacob's leaving cause a perspective shift in anyone remaining there? Seriously doubt it. I don't see what a new person ramping up has to do with this. And I don't really see any positive effect of virality; this is a replay of the past (see Geoffrey Hinton and Timnit Gebru[0] for example) and nothing has come of it, beyond talk for maybe a couple days to a couple weeks. [0] https://ethicalaidepartures.fyi

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deaux 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right, I assume tomorrow you'll be applying for the next Nazi camp guard vacancy? After all, if you don't do it, someone with less scruples likely will.

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salawat 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The best way to get corporate America to listen is making RoI suffer. If you are the most qualified, everyone other than you is less qualified for the job, and likely to bring in more waste. It's the only language this stupid damn country understands. Just the loss of tribal knowledge, shifting of workload, and morale hits are likely to be far more devastating than anyone here probably wants to admit, because most here completely dismiss the role of irrational modes of thought in psychological self-regulation.

Disgust is a tremendously powerful thing.

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mitthrowaway2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He's also setting the bar for other people with scruples to rally around this schelling point. The solution to a multipolar trap is to cooperate. Otherwise, you become the very person with less scruples that you're worrying about.

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techblueberry 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Refusing to believe what things? Unsubstantiated allegations about fellow workers inner experience?

	▲	jeremyjh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Refusing to believe the obvious implications of recently reported events.

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foogazi 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There are thousands willing to do his role

1. Does that matter ? There are thousands willing to do my role - what impact does that have on me doing it or not?

2. Why weren’t these thousands doing it already?

Willing to and able to are different things

	▲	aogaili 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you are looking at it from individuals perspective. I see a fast moving train with no brakes. Just like biological evolution, we are locked in an a global technological arm race, that is beyond any individual. It is as if the universe decided to wake up and run, who are you to say no? One would argue that the best solution for this is to own the most sophisticated AI that is aligned with what we perceive as good values. Because given the situation we are in, if those tools are going to be gods anytime soon, then we better have some gods working on our side.

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mlmonkey 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. And his doom words have set a 1000 mouths in the Pentagon/Whitehall/August 1st Building/Kremlin salivating with excitement.

Take China, for example. Look at any recent ML conference, and see the fraction of articles majority-authored from Chinese universities and labs. Do you think they'll slow things down anytime soon? I don't think so!

It's a global arms race, and we're just spectators.

	▲	foogazi 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Does this matter vs actual capabilities? Does the Kremlin being excited about a tech mean anything of the tech doesn’t deliver?

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sb8244 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Awareness and morality I suppose. Which generally doesn't matter in the capitalist AI race.

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bigstrat2003 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if others won't act right, that doesn't mean you have no responsibility to act right. I think his premise is flawed - the idea that we will get an actual intelligence out of the slop machine that is LLMs is laughable - but if you grant the premise that this is dangerous research which could kill us all, you have a moral imperative to not participate.

	▲	dgellow 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		An artificial moron with super human hacking abilities (mostly because of speed and ease of parallelizing the work) is extremely dangerous in itself. It doesn’t mean to be AGI or anything remotely close to be a risk, and they current AI company are just so irresponsible in the way they are running their agents