An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm

一名 OpenAI 安全员工辞职并发出警示

David Robinson used to write the safety reports that accompanied every major model release at OpenAI. This week, he resigned from his position and is now speaking out in an editorial in The Atlantic. David Robinson 曾负责撰写 OpenAI 每次重大模型发布时随附的安全报告。本周，他辞去了职务，并在《大西洋月刊》的一篇社论中公开表达了自己的观点。

It’s understandable if you’re feeling a bit cynical about everyone suddenly coming out of the woodwork to warn about how dangerous the thing they helped build is. They did, after all, make this mess. But that doesn’t mean we should discount their warnings. 如果大家对那些曾经参与构建 AI 的人突然纷纷站出来警告其危险性感到愤世嫉俗，这是可以理解的。毕竟，正是他们制造了这一局面。但这并不意味着我们应该忽视他们的警告。

Robinson says that the culture in the industry is fundamentally broken. That this is a deeper issue than simply slapping a few new rules or regulations on how we handle training models. Silicon Valley has operated with “extreme confidence” and “perpetual sprints,” he says, building bigger and better models with “unimpeded optimism” that ignores or underestimates potential problems. Robinson 表示，该行业的文化从根本上已经崩坏。这不仅仅是简单地在模型训练方式上增加几条新规则或监管措施就能解决的深层问题。他说，硅谷一直以“极度自信”和“永无止境的冲刺”模式运作，以一种“毫无阻碍的乐观主义”构建更大、更好的模型，却忽视或低估了潜在的问题。

He says the time has come for AI companies to develop a sense of humility and look outside the insular, move-fast-and-break-things world of the tech industry. Specifically, he says AI needs nuclear-level safeguards: 他认为，AI 公司现在是时候培养一种谦逊感，并跳出科技行业那种封闭的、“快速行动、打破常规”的思维模式了。具体来说，他认为 AI 需要核能级别的安全保障：

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. “鉴于当今的风险，前沿实验室的运作需要像核电站或繁忙的机场一样，具备多重冗余和严谨、耗时的规划，以确保偶尔且不可避免的人为错误不会开启灾难之门。”

Robinson is just the latest in a growing parade of researchers and safety workers who have left their positions at prominent AI firms. Jacob Coxon seems to have kicked off the exodus by quitting Anthropic and then publicly saying AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” He was followed by Robert O’Callahan, Bilal Chughtai, and Josh Engels at Google DeepMind, as well as Joe Benton at Anthropic. Robinson 只是近期从知名 AI 公司离职的研究人员和安全从业者大军中的最新一员。Jacob Coxon 似乎开启了这波离职潮，他在从 Anthropic 辞职后公开表示，AI “可能会在本世纪末之前杀死我们所有人”。随后，Google DeepMind 的 Robert O’Callahan、Bilal Chughtai 和 Josh Engels，以及 Anthropic 的 Joe Benton 也相继离职。