The Great AI Freakout Has Begun

Ryan Knutson (0:05)

It's been a wild few days in the world of AI. At first, things started out on a high.

Robert McMillan (0:11)

Yeah, I mean, early in the week, last week, there was euphoria at OpenAI.

Ryan Knutson (0:16)

That's our colleague Bob McMillan, who covers technology. OpenAI had said it had solved the so-called Millennium Prize math problem.

Robert McMillan (0:24)

This mathematical prize that was considered just a few years ago something that was unattainable by an AI system. And it was yet another of these sort of magical breakthroughs that AI systems seem to be achieving at a very regular pace. You know, here's another example of this new age of amazing breakthroughs that were in.

And then came Tuesday.

Ryan Knutson (0:53)

On Tuesday, over at Anthropic, a researcher named Jacob Coxen quit. And posted on X that he was quitting because he was worried about how powerful artificial intelligence had become.

Robert McMillan (1:04)

He walked away from one of the greatest jobs in Silicon Valley. And he did it because he said he thought the products he was working on could kill everyone.

Ryan Knutson (1:18)

Coxen said that Anthropic and OpenAI are moving too fast, and quote, gambling with our lives.

Then, on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the industry did need to slow down. And by the end of the weekend, leaders at other major AI companies, including Sam Altman at Rival OpenAI and Elon Musk, agreed.

Robert McMillan (1:42)

If you roll the clock back one year, it's incredible all of the things that AI has been able to achieve. Like a year ago, I would have told you that these AI systems, if you'd kind of jerry-rigged them, they could maybe do some interesting stuff, but mostly they were just overwhelming people with slop.

And now, we're talking about fully autonomous systems, hacking real-world companies, and the people who administer these systems not even knowing it's happening. Like, that's a plot that's ripped from science fiction, and it seemed like an impossibility a year ago.

Ryan Knutson (2:23)

Do you feel like we've reached an inflection point with AI, a breaking point in some sense?

Robert McMillan (2:30)

Well, I mean, in some domains, yeah, we have. And I think what's really going on is that the AI systems are improving at a pace that is scary to a lot of people. So it's not so much an inflection point, it's that we're not seeing a deceleration of these improvements, and the improvements are passing these milestones that have people very scared.

Ryan Knutson (3:01)

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, September 14th.

Coming up on the show, the week that AI fears went into overdrive.

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Ryan Knutson (5:01)

There are basically two things that have everyone so freaked out about AI right now.

The first is that AI models are getting better at an extremely rapid pace. And they're starting to be able to improve themselves with very little help.

Robert McMillan (5:16)

So in the spring, both OpenAI and Anthropic talked about how their models were getting very good at this thing called recursive self-improvement, which means fixing and improving themselves with no or very little human intervention.