We’ll take the AIs
Australia is courting the world’s most powerful AI companies just as America starts to freak out over what it has created.
The people building the world's most powerful artificial intelligence systems have spent recent weeks warning that those systems might kill us all.
An Anthropic employee resigned on September 9 saying the labs were "gambling with our lives" in a post on X that was viewed over 170 million times. Evan Hubinger, whose job title at Anthropic is 'alignment science lead', replied that the odds of AI killing every human within a decade were, by his estimate, better than one in ten.
By the following weekend the bosses had joined in. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow the pace at which it improves frontier models, warning that within six to 12 months a swarm of models could become capable of "taking over the entire internet". OpenAI boss Sam Altman endorsed the plan and even Elon Musk replied, "Dario is right".
And yet the week before, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister was in Silicon Valley asking whether they might like to build some of that good stuff here. Poor Richard Marles could hardly have timed his sales pitch better for tragicomic effect, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.
