From The People Building It
Even They Are Afraid Of It.
Activists and journalists are not the only ones making the case against Stargate. The CEOs of the companies building this technology have publicly said, in their own words and in their own signed statements, that the thing they are constructing in our backyard could end human civilization. Read these slowly. Then read them again.
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
2023 Open Letter Signed by Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), and 350+ AI researchers
The bad case, and I think this is important to say, is, like, lights out for all of us.
Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI, on the worst case scenario for the technology his company is building
Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.
Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI, before founding OpenAI
I have not met anyone in AI labs who says the risk from training a next generation model is less than 1 percent of blowing up the planet.
Jaan Tallinn Lead investor at Anthropic, co-founder of Skype
AI has the potential of civilizational destruction.
Elon Musk Co-founder of OpenAI, founder of xAI
This is an existential risk.
Geoffrey Hinton Nobel laureate, Turing Award winner, "Godfather of AI." Left Google in 2023 specifically to warn the public.
AI could decide that humans are a threat.
Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft, which owns roughly half of OpenAI
So here is the situation.
The people building this technology are publicly saying it could cause human extinction. They signed a letter comparing it to nuclear war. Then they are building the biggest one of these facilities ever attempted in human history on the outskirts of Abilene, Texas. They are doing it with an 85 percent tax abatement, an on site gas plant that pumps 1.6 million tons of pollution into our air, a 1.2 gigawatt draw on a grid that already killed Texans once, and a promise of 357 jobs. If even the CEOs say there is a real chance this technology destroys the world, the absolute least Abilene deserves is to not be the first place sacrificed to find out.
