One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

I'm an AI engineer, I feel similarly.

I also feel a need to amass retirement levels of wealth right ASAP before this all comes crashing down, and then move to somewhere else away from this mess.

The only good way for me to do that is to keep working in AI, because nothing else that I have skills for pays that high.

One resignation distracted from the constant failures of AI in order to boost its value yet again, and to advocate for a particular AI company as saintly.

I have yet to see a positive improvement in the world that could be blamed on AI. Why don't they fix the DMVs of the world? The answer is that they would if they could, it would be great PR, but they can't. They can't even operate a phone for the corner drugstore.

I'm bullish on LLMs and they're defeating any optimism I have daily. I should see every program on my computer improving, but they're getting worse. I should see every website getting cleaner while heavy, crappy frameworks put in for developer convenience are being removed and being replaced with feather-light, minimal code and new designs that anticipate my needs. Nope, even getting worse. This is coding, where they're best.

Can somebody tell me anything that AI has improved in my life? The costs are obvious and massive. Just one improvement to hold onto my optimism.

It seems deeply suspicious that a company benefitting from regulatory capture would artificially stoke fears of AI and propaganda about it.

I’ve heard many of the AI doomer arguments including Bostrom’s Superintelligence.

But it’s still hard for me to take them seriously. These arguments start with reasonable assumptions and then project them wildly. Current LLMs are powerful and can be used dangerously. It’s reasonable to accept a few tumultuous years of change. But I can’t see them reasonably leading to civilization-ending doom.

Are the doomers within the AI industry overly anxious? Or am I missing something?

This will either be normal crisis, in which case no point in panicking. Or it is existential, in which case, no point in panicking.

If this turns out to be existential, what would anyone be able to do to prepare? Short of politically controlling territory with a population and militia, any plan is merely some blind bet in it not really being existential and you figuring out what will be safe.

Superintelligence by Bostrom came out in 2014, I recommend reading it, at the time I thought it was some of the best sci fi I'd ever consumed, and did not think it would be a public debate within my lifetime. What I find interesting is that respected/knowledgable people have been on TV/Mainstream media saying this for a few years now, Jack Clark has been in front of Congress multiple times. What changed about this particular message that made it so gripping? My little sister msg'd me last night and asked me "Can AI really kill us all? Why can't we just unplug it?". Interesting times....!

My personal opinions (not necessarily reflecting my company's):

1. Free-form capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with AI. In other words, competent AI brings a free-form (low regulation) capitalistic environment to total collapse. (This is actually not my own opinion; heard the details from several economists and it makes sense to me).

2. Hiding from AI will not be an option for long. It will affect many jobs (often by increasing productivity at a macro level; it can reduce some productivity here and there, obviously).

3. The concerns about costs of energy (of the current applications) are short term. Follow major Electrical Engineering conferences to see why. In short, several ideas can drastically reduce the energy / token inference costs (some about 100x). Some existing companies are working on those ideas and at least one has a proof of concept (since 2018) and they raised capital to scale, late in 2025. Of course, once AI inference becomes cheap (in terms of energy per token), more hardware will be doing that, so overall I don't know where the costs will go. That is, new applications might become popular, using overall more tokens and eating through the "moore's law" of Inference energy.

4. The only way to prevent mass NEGATIVE disruption on state / country level is to HOLD THE SITUATION IN HAND and fully and consciously take it toward a good end state. Which needs GENIUS level analysis, insight, and execution, from the administration. Some countries are going to fare this better than the others.

Why is all this drama coming only from the American companies?

Rise in energy prices under increasing AI DCs power draw and wasteful usage of clean water in AI DCs cooling are LEAST of my worries regarding AI.

The scale of damage when occurring is what worries me.

Eg. in old times when someone wanted to eavesdrop someones phone they needed ratio of 1:1 in person count, one keeping up the conversation and another one transcripting it up. Then some more people to intrepret that transcript an make conclusions, maybe even decisions what comes next. That is not the reality we leave in today. Today's scale of data processing and storage capabilities makes the ratio of 1:8298979488 (AI:everyone). I don't want us to ever have AI decision making over those transcripts with the same ratio. Possibility seems clearly to be there soon.

Another eg. in old times when someone wanted to dig into vulnerable system they needed ratio of 1:1 in count, one person having time to dig in one system at a time. I don't want to know how many critical and vulnerable systems we have running today in this planet connected to the same network these AI agents are run. Yes, over time you can use AI to find and patch those vulnerabilities but the scale and speed to do harm (exploiting every system at once) is the problem here.

Jacob Coxon is listed as a 2021 fellow on Newspeak House's official site. Media has called Newspeak a hub of "civic hackers" aiming to improve/hack democratic tools and processes.

What is "RSI"? This is the first I'm hearing of this alleged wildfire.

The best way to stifle AI growth would be to deprive the labs of capital, and yet these AI safetyists never seem to seriously attack the money side.

It gives away the game entirely, they want regulatory capture and the politicians boosting it want millions in donations from the IPOs, there's big money in this type of AI grifting.

The SEC should heed the AI labs own warnings and forbid any AI lab doing doom marketing from doing an IPO, for safety of course.

I think that more people are finally realizing that the best plan of major AI companies sounds more or less like:

- We'll build an AGI able to perform most cognitive tasks at least at human level (including, of course, the most fulfilling)

- This will wreak havoc in the job market, but people can still compete for jobs requiring physical labor, until robots take also most of these jobs

- Then, we'll build an artificial super-intelligence way smarter than any human, and we'll be forever the pet species of a silicon god operating according to "human values"

- In the process, there's a non-negligible probability that humanity will go extinct

The goal may be to build a super-intelligence, but the plan is incredibly dumb !

And it's all largely baseless FUD. As someone else said, it's either a tractable challenge, in which case there's no point for alarm, or it's a nontraversable existential challenge, in which case there's no point for alarm. The people who claim it is the latter have no real empirical basis on which to base such an opinion other than simply fearing AND mistrusting the unknown.

It did not.

Guys it's going to be fine just relax. Everyone is AI psychosis'd as fuck right now.

Fake psyop slop. Guy worked there for 6 weeks, almost no X followers when he posted his “I quit” thread, WSJ then posted their story around this post 18 mins later.