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When Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, his warning rocked the world. His colleague Evan’s “>10% chance” that AI would “kill all humans” might seem extreme, but it’s not unusual:

Most AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance of AI destroying or disempowering humanity, according to our survey, released today.
https://x.com/AIImpacts/status/2099581080223576403

in reply to Katja Grace

I’m an independent researcher who runs the largest and longest-running peer-reviewed survey of AI researchers. These researchers are experts who publish papers at the top machine learning and artificial intelligence venues.
in reply to Katja Grace

We’ve been conducting these surveys since 2016, so we can see how expert opinion has moved over the years.

Two trends:
1) Researchers' 'timelines' to human-level AI have shrunk, fast.
2) Most researchers have seen major future risks of extinction-level catastrophes for a long time, and their concerns are lately trending upward

in reply to Katja Grace

This loosely mirrors what I hear from talking to people in the field:
1) AI is advancing much faster than researchers expected
2) Catastrophic risks have been looming for a while, and people are increasingly worried
in reply to Katja Grace

(A figure of how the distribution of concern changed in the year before this survey, that I'm told is too complicated for people, but give it a go!)
in reply to Katja Grace

Also interesting: many people worry that China will race ahead in AI if the US slows down to avoid human extinction. (It’s unclear to me why China would not also want to slow down in this account).

But Asian researchers in our survey were actually more worried!
https://x.com/AIImpacts/status/2099581081901211878

in reply to Katja Grace

Our survey has many other interesting results, read the AI Impacts thread for more!
https://x.com/AIImpacts/status/2099581078210236850