AI Insiders Warn of Superintelligence Extinction Risk — SkimNews
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- Palisade Research, a non-profit studying AI capabilities and motivations, collected and launched about a dozen video interviews on frominside.ai featuring current and former employees of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
- Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said the chance of human extinction from AI is "about a coin flip."
- Neel Nanda, a Google DeepMind research scientist, estimated "at least a 10 percent chance" AI causes human extinction, calling that figure "ridiculously high."
- Daniel Kokotajilo, a former OpenAI researcher, said superintelligent AI "would basically be god-like powerful" and added "we don't know how to control them at all."
- Mary Phuong of Google told viewers to be "suspicious of what I'm saying because I am being paid by the lab," openly acknowledging her conflict of interest.
- Nanda justified continuing his work by saying he would "quit" if he did not believe his work was "directly reducing these existential risks."
- The collected videos include segments on whether the warnings are hype or marketing and why researchers keep working on technology they consider dangerous, though no single cohesive solution is offered.
Why it matters: These aren't outside critics — they're current and former employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic publicly estimating a 10% (Nanda) to roughly 50% (Irving's coin flip) chance AI causes human extinction. When the people building frontier systems are the ones sounding alarms, their warnings become much harder to dismiss as uninformed external hand-wringing.
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