Welcome back. The main thing happening today is an Anthropic researcher quitting over fears AI is spiralling out of control. Live from 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
An AI researcher has quit Anthropic warning that the whole industry is racing somewhere it can't control.
Jacob Coxon resigned yesterday after three years working on pre-training at Anthropic and OpenAI, using his departure to speak openly about the direction of the companies. Neither company, he wrote, is acting responsibly: both are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, is still at the company and publicly backed Coxon on X. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he wrote, putting the chances at more than 10% over the next decade. He said Anthropic is “trying its best,” but admitted that “we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Both were careful to say the danger isn't today's models, which Hubinger called low-risk. The fear is recursive self-improvement, AI systems getting good enough to upgrade themselves with little human input, which Anthropic says is arriving faster than it expected. Coxon's warning to colleagues still inside the labs was to stop assuming it's inevitable, "don’t put your head down because it's happening anyway."
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
eToro founder and CEO Yoni Assia joined the show to talk AI, who actually gets to make money in markets, and the most important question of all: which founder would he pick in the Street Fighter for Startups game?
"The holy grail of the best possible product in finance is a product that generates 30 to 50% returns a year consistently," he said, the kind of thing the top hedge funds pull off by "harnessing huge amounts of data and a huge amount of compute and quantitative talent." Most assume that's impossible. Assia thinks AI is changing it. "A lot of the things that two years ago were unimaginable, even for me as the founder of eToro", are now real, with a quant team developing strategies "at a pace and amount that I wouldn't believe possible three years ago."
Watch the full interview here.
HIGHLIGHT FROM THE TIMELINE
The King is reportedly set to host around 30 of the biggest names in AI at Dumfries House in Ayrshire later this month. Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and the Vatican's AI adviser Paolo Benanti are all named among the guests, according to Politico. The King won't push a view of his own, palace sources say his role is to "convene, engage, listen and encourage debate."
VIEWER TAKES
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