I believe he is acting with integrity but I can't respect it as I think it's not well grounded. It seems based in fear of AI tied in with some beliefs about the supernatural. I really can't see the solid concrete reason to quit his job making tools for helping create better hardware chips that somehow seems rational.

Any system is set up for and tuned around absorbing some amount of input at a time -- nutrients, say. If it gets too little, it starves and dies. If it gets too much, it breaks down and dies. A system can adapt over time, at a limited rate, and become capable of handling more or less.

Drinking a glass of water is beneficial and necessary. Drinking 100L in one go and you're dead.

The argument is that the rate of AI influx is too high for our human systems to metabolize, and so the system will break down. Not just operate in a degraded way, but break down and cause mass catastrophe. Even there, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity, just 99.9% of us.

What the argument is not: AI is fundamentally poisonous. We are incapable of handling any level of AI. We will never be able to incorporate more AI. AI provides no benefit.

So quitting AI but still working on AI is not the contradiction it seems: you can quit accelerating AI and work on metabolizing it. And in fact that work is very necessary right now.

oddly these are the same issues I have with religion.

keep in mind he doesn't work in AI but in creating tools for hardware design.

FWIW I was in the GDM GenAI unit. Not exactly working on AI directly, or I would have quit earlier, but in the middle of it.

so you don't think realized goods like AlphaFold don't out weigh unrealized fears of AI doom? so you quit?

It's not that simple; the goods of AlphaFold are mostly not yet realized, and some negative effects of AI are being realized.

More importantly, as I tried to make clear in my post, the main reason I quit is not specific fears of AI doom (I'm uncertain about that), but my belief that AI is progressing too fast.

Sort of struggling to see an actual reason other than he doesn't like the pace of AI advancement? Also that his current job is very indirectly related to AI? Then somehow ties religion into it.

I've been using chatgpt to tutor my son to improve his writing skills. It actually works quite well and the lessons adapt to his skill level. I seeded it with the curriculum and marking guidelines for his school year. Each lesson is timeboxed to 30 minutes and he stops if the lesson goes over time. I then feed this back into chatgpt and it adapts the lessons appropriately. It's helped quite a bit with a definite improvement in his writing skills. He actually wants to do this instead of school as he feels he gets a lot more out of it!

lots and lots of koi at the moment!

very little details so far, really curious if it actually "hacked" or just found unsecured resources.

that's not really the same thing, what you are describing is redundancy so failure in one (or more) place doesn't bring the system down. Backups are about preventing data loss. Data loss can happen in many different ways, not just a system crashing and burning. It can be deliberately/accidently done such that it would be sync'd everywhere.

Not really, you only need to know you can get at it. One day you might be doing something like processing images or video and you are finding it slow and getting down to this level can be helpful. But it wouldn't necessarily be the first thing you'd look at.

kernels aren't meant to be written by any defined language. C is just a traditionally good default language that took over from assembly. No particular reason we have to stick with C.

And quite a few reasons that something better than C should be used. Rust seems a good candidate.

What reasons would you have to prefer Rust over C for compute kernels? I am a great fan of Rust, but I don't see any benefit for kernels, due to their relatively simple nature.

I'm not sure why being relatively simple would mean C over Rust? Rust still has the safety advantages.