AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous as it sounds’

“The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view,” Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It’s one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Palisade Research, which says it’s a nonprofit studying AIs’ capabilities and motivations, collected and launched the interviews on frominside.ai.

Several of the researchers joined Irving in warning about the possibility AI could drive humans extinct. Neel Nanda, a Google DeepMind research scientist, said there’s “at least a 10 percent chance that it causes human extinction, and that is ridiculously high.” We noted comments from both Nanda and Irving in a recent report about the “AI safety” community, and how difficult it is to nail down what that term means, or what anyone should do about it, and even these videos don’t have one cohesive solution to offer.

Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo went as far as claiming that superintelligent AI “would basically be god-like powerful,” and added, “unfortunately we don’t know how to control them at all. And so probably nobody would control them. This is exactly as dangerous as it sounds and must not be allowed to happen.”

While each video is available in full, the site also collects segments from multiple people speaking on similar topics, including whether this is all just hype or marketing, and why they would work on something that they believe is this dangerous. Some of the responses include Google’s Mary Phuong saying “I think you absolutely should be suspicious of what I’m saying because I am being paid by the lab,” and Nanda’s explanation that “If I did not believe that my work was directly reducing these existential risks, I would quit… These companies are not going to stop making these systems just because I quit.”