Could AI actually destroy humanity within the next five years?

A few days ago, I came across a series of posts from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic.

His warning was pretty damn alarming.

According to Coxon, the major AI labs are racing toward self improving AI and eventually superintelligence. And if that process goes badly, he believes AI could potentially cause human extinction before the end of this decade.

Normally, I would read something like this, roll my eyes, and go back to whatever I was doing.

But then something interesting happened.

His post went massively viral. And researchers and leaders from inside major AI labs began publicly expressing similar concerns.

These aren’t random people on X predicting that Skynet is coming.

They’re people who actually work on these systems.

For example, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki has called for extreme caution around the continued rapid rise of machine intelligence. Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has discussed a greater than 10% chance of AI killing all humans within the next decade.

Now, I’m skeptical of a lot of AI doomerism.

I don’t believe we’re going to wake up one morning and discover that ChatGPT has become a conscious machine god that has decided humanity is cringe and needs to be deleted.

That sounds more like an AI generated cosmic horror novel.