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More than a hundred protestors marched between the San Francisco headquarters of Anthropic PBC and OpenAI earlier this month, calling for a pause on the race to improve artificial intelligence. Take one look at their paint-scrawled signs — “Pls do not kill me” and “QuitGPT” — and some might think them crackpots with a surface-level understanding of the technology. But their fears point to one of the hottest new trends in the field: so-called recursive self improvement, or AI that can develop itself.
There is not only ample evidence this sci-fi shift is possible, but billions of dollars are being poured into it. It’s also unclear that any “pause” is even possible.
“We believe that building AI that can automate AI research and can self improve can be a danger to the human race,” said Michael Trazzi in a recent television interview. Trazzi is one of the campaigners who went on an eight-day hunger strike outside the offices of Google DeepMind last year. “It’s not only me and other researchers saying this but the labs themselves.”
He is right. After AI-powered coding tools led to a leap forward in development at OpenAI and Anthropic, both labs have been hiring researchers on the bet that their ChatGPT and Claude tools can make themselves smarter.
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