I’ve talked to a lot of people who have left leading AI companies for reasons related to thinking that their company was being insufficiently cautious. I wouldn’t usually say that they’d left “in protest”; for example, most of them haven’t directly criticized the companies after leaving.
In my experience, the main reason that most of these people left was that they found it very unpleasant to working there and thought their research would be better elsewhere, not that they wanted to protest poor safety policies per se. I usually advise such people against leaving if the company has very few safety staff, but it depends on their skillset.
(These arguments don’t apply to Anthropic: there are many people there who I think will try to implement reasonable safety techniques, so on the current margin, the benefits to safety technique implementation of marginal people seems way lower. It might still make sense to work at Anthropic, especially if you think it’s a good place to do safety research that can be exported.)
Incidentally, I’m happy to talk to people who are considering leaving AI companies and give them much more specific advice.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who have left leading AI companies for reasons related to thinking that their company was being insufficiently cautious. I wouldn’t usually say that they’d left “in protest”; for example, most of them haven’t directly criticized the companies after leaving.
In my experience, the main reason that most of these people left was that they found it very unpleasant to working there and thought their research would be better elsewhere, not that they wanted to protest poor safety policies per se. I usually advise such people against leaving if the company has very few safety staff, but it depends on their skillset.
(These arguments don’t apply to Anthropic: there are many people there who I think will try to implement reasonable safety techniques, so on the current margin, the benefits to safety technique implementation of marginal people seems way lower. It might still make sense to work at Anthropic, especially if you think it’s a good place to do safety research that can be exported.)
Incidentally, I’m happy to talk to people who are considering leaving AI companies and give them much more specific advice.