Rr debugger creator quits Google over AI's pace

Robert O'Callahan, the software engineer behind the rr debugger and Pernosco, said he resigned from Google on Thursday. He worked on tools for AI chip design, and believes AI progress is "far too rapid" for people to adapt to.

O'Callahan wrote on his blog that his team's goal was to make AI cheaper and lower-latency. Moving to a different Google project was impractical, he said, because the company has no other engineering work in New Zealand, where he lives. "My hands are tied," he wrote.

He said he takes AI-safety warnings from people inside Google DeepMind seriously. Phenomena predicted by AI "doomers" — reward hacking, misalignment, deceptive models — have "come to pass," he wrote. He also said he is confident AI capability will keep increasing, and disputed critics who call AI a "scam." But he said the current rate of change outpaces what people and institutions can plan around.

O'Callahan said the timing was coincidental: he had long planned to leave before a ten-day backpacking trip starting this week, unrelated to a recent run of AI-related resignations elsewhere in the industry. He said he will keep maintaining rr and Pernosco and plans to look at how AI could help with debugging.