Only in San Francisco: A picnic about AI's potential risks

About this episode

Urgent concerns about losing control of AI have burst into the national conversation recently after the OpenAI hack of the open-source AI platform Hugging Face, the high-profile resignation of an Anthropic researcher, and other AI insiders sharing alarmingly high p(doom) figures — that is, the probability that AI kills us all. An event listing for a picnic beckoned people in the AI scene to spend a Sunday afternoon talking about recent calls to slow down the technology. Dony Christie, a community organizer in the AI safety scene, chose this spot not for the scenery but because it’s between the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI. “The hope is, why can't people at the labs just meet at a park in between them and work out a deal?” he said. “I have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like, what do I do to save the world?”