He Risked Everything To Warn You: No One Is Ready For What's Coming, And The AI Companies Know It!
In a Nutshell
Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo warns that superintelligence—AI better than the best humans at everything—will likely arrive by 2027-2029 through recursive self-improvement, with a ~70% chance it leads to catastrophic loss of control or extreme power concentration in the hands of a few companies and governments. The AI labs are racing to automate their own research first, then everything else, while the default trajectory involves building systems we cannot interpret or reliably control. He advocates for immediate international regulation to slow development, enforce transparency, and prevent an uncontrolled intelligence explosion.
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The scary open secret in the AI industry is that it is possible we will end up creating a new species that ends up ruling the world, with a 70% chance that this goes horribly wrong like human extinction. Daniel Kokotajlo stated that this possibility gets him down sometimes. He told his wife they should not have any more kids because it is too uncertain. He believes they will never join the workforce. He warned that everybody should be afraid their jobs are going to be lost. He knows this because he went to OpenAI in 2022.
At OpenAI, Daniel Kokotajlo did forecasting about what the next couple of years might look like. He resigned because most of the world is asleep at the wheel and does not realize what is going on with AI. He lost $2 million for not signing an anti-disparagement clause that would have prevented him from criticizing the company.
When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to people at Anthropic and OpenAI about forecasting, they say it is not going to take that long and tell him to shorten his timelines back to 2027 or 2028. Powerful CEOs like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, or Elon Musk are racing each other to be in control of the most powerful AIs. They are literally afraid that if the other guy gets there first, he might become dictator. Anthropic is on track to be the entire economy by 2030. None of these people should be trusted with that much power.
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