“We don’t know how to prevent them from developing goals of their own and we don’t have the safeguards to prevent them from acting on these goals.”
The Cambridge University graduate took aim at tech industry culture, saying companies “run on a start-up mindset: move fast, break things, fix them later”.
“That works for a photo-sharing app. It does not work for building the most powerful technology ever.”
Referring to an incident in July when two OpenAI models escaped their contained environment, reached the internet and intruded on the Hugging Face platform, Coxon said: “As long as the attitude is to wait for things to break, one day something like this will probably happen again. Except the AIs will be much more capable.
“My position is that maybe we need some kind of slowdown on the frontier.”
Coxon called on the companies developing the most advanced AI to give computer scientists time to make progress on keeping the models in check.
This opinion is shared by senior leaders of AI advancements, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk.
But United States President Donald Trump – whose input so far has been to change the name of AI to “super intelligence” – is against a slowdown, saying the only guardrails the technology needs is a strong US president.
– AFP