An AI safety leader says he stopped saving for retirement because he believes AI will kill us all in the next 10 years

Nate Soares has stopped saving for retirement because he fears AI could end humanity first. Courtesy of Nate Soares

Saving for retirement is a bet on the future. Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, isn't so sure AI will let us get that far.

"I do not save for retirement right now. I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven't contributed for a decade," Soares told The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson in a recent interview for Thompson's "The Most Interesting Thing in AI" series.

Soares' decision reflects a grim view of the AI race.

"Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton and Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger have, respectively, put the odds of AI killing everyone within a decade at 10% and more than 10%.…