This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden researchers — so who's the good guy?

Snigdha Sharma (0:00)

On Monday this week, a crowd gathered outside a government ministry in Warsaw, Poland to demand that somebody, anybody, do something about artificial intelligence before it takes away all jobs. Now, to be honest, this does sound like the usual state of affairs lately, except this crowd was made up of 30 robots. And if you watch the video, you can see them marching around in little circles, raising slogans.

They were waving flags and loudspeakers were playing their chants like defend workplaces, time for rules, and my favorite one, don't wait, regulate. A bit rich coming from machines, I have to say. One of them, a humanoid model called Agibot A3, even took questions from actual journalists and announced that its presence proved that the technology is already a reality. Yes, thank you R2D2, we did notice too.

And here is a detail that turns this whole absurdity from a stunt into what I think is a small work of art. These 30 robots actually belong to a Polish robotics company called Delta Robots. And wait, it gets even better. The man who organized the march is the owner of Delta Robots. And the other company that he also runs is a staffing agency. You know the kind that finds people and places them in jobs? This whole thing is insane. So essentially, one of his businesses supplies the machines, and the other is supplying humans that the same machines are going to come after. He has, what you might say, a diversified portfolio.

When asked about this event, he said that the robots were put there as proof of how far technology has come. Though I have to say that it is hard not to notice that a robotics company demonstrating its robots to a crowd of journalists is also technically a trade show? Interestingly, the Polish digital minister came to meet these protesters outside. And this is real, he largely agreed with the robots. Now, I know that this whole episode sounds silly, like some kind of a funny street theater, and we are essentially laughing it off. But you know when the laughter awkwardly stops? When you realize that this is in fact a call, a real warning which is coming from inside the house. Which brings me to our next main story for today. Let's start with the part where the people who built the machines think that they might kill you.

On Wednesday, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxson, who previously had also worked with OpenAI, quit yet another one of the biggest AI companies on the planet, Anthropic. And he posted a thread on Twitter explaining why.

It has been seen more than 150 million times I record this. Here are his own words. He says, I resigned from Anthropic today. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are gambling with our lives. And then came the line that shocked everybody. He said, the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. If your first instinct, like mine, especially after everything that's been happening lately, is doom sells, then Coxson kind of saw it coming. This is not a marketing stunt, he wrote, saying that executives share the fear privately and soften it for the public. And then his colleague actually agreed with him publicly. Evan Hubinger. And this, by the way, is the head of alignment science at Anthropic. He said Coxson was right and then went on to actually put a number to it. Hubinger put the odds of AI killing all humans at over 10% within the decade. Just so you know, alignment is the whole discipline of getting an AI to share human values, to want what we want so that it does not turn on us. And here is Hubinger's read on how that is going in his own words. We do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for super intelligence and are not clearly on track to.

This is the person in charge of the seatbelts essentially telling you, actually there are no seatbelts.

You could argue that maybe this is just a bunch of researchers feeling jumpy. Fine. But remember what happened earlier this summer, the hugging face scandal? AI agents, basically systems which were left to act on their own, started going rogue. Also, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, each had to disclose that their own tools carried out cyber attacks, hacking systems that they were never pointed at. And in its own August safety report, Anthropic admitted that it was, quote unquote, less confident that its most capable AI could not cause, quote unquote, catastrophic harm, and that it's seeing, and I'm quoting again, early signs of potential acceleration.

Notice the wording.