Wonder who at NIST is actually going to leave over this (if any).

Critics of so-called “AI doomers” have warned that focusing on any potentially overblown talk of hypothetical killer AI systems or existential AI risks may stop humanity from focusing on current perceived harms from AI, including environmental, privacy, ethics, and bias issues.

As a doomer, honestly I can never parse if this sort of thing is “AI ESG trying to defect against us even though we’ve been trying to play nice with them very hard” or “AI accelerationists trying to drive a wedge into AI safety.”

Kaushik cautioned, however, that “if there’s truth to NIST scientists threatening to quit” over Christiano’s appointment, “obviously that would be serious if true.”

In other words, “big, if true”.

Timnit Gebru, who founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute after Google fired her from their AI ethical research team after she spoke out against discrimination, criticized Christiano’s blog on X.

“What’s better, that he wrote a blog on a cult forum, or that he just pulled random numbers out of his behind for this apocalyptic prediction?” Gebru wrote. “As they say, why not both.”

Okay I take it back, this is … wait, she’s not even defecting, she’s just shitting on him randomly for lolz. Destroy Twitter when?

Currently, Christiano has said that a pause isn’t necessary because “the current level of risk is low enough that I think it is defensible for companies or countries to continue AI development if they have a sufficiently good plan for detecting and reacting to increasing risk.”

Well let’s all hope he’s right about that.