By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-09-26 05:29:00
Robert O’Callahan, a Google DeepMind engineer based in Auckland, has resigned over how fast artificial intelligence is advancing. In a resignation email shared on his blog this week, he wrote that AI progress is “far too rapid”. His team’s goal of making AI “much cheaper and lower-latency”, he added, was not good for people right now.Yet O’Callahan stops short of the extinction warnings that have dominated the AI debate this month. He wrote that he is “not convinced the chance of ASI doom is 100%”, referring to artificial superintelligence. The risk, in his view, is “real but uncertain”. That alone, he argued, makes chasing ASI in the near future “inherently irresponsible”.
Google DeepMind engineer says his chip design work was speeding up AI
O’Callahan did not build AI models himself. He worked on tools for hardware chip design. For a while, he wrote, he told himself the work was relatively harmless. Over time he came to accept that its main impact would be faster design of a new…