Goodbye Google
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Robert O'Callahan resigns from Google over its AI direction, citing faith and moral objections to accelerating the technology.
The post is a short resignation announcement by Robert O'Callahan, a longtime Mozilla engineer (rr, Pernosco) then at Google. He states his team's goal was to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and he does not think that is good for people right now, which is why he left. The post itself is brief and largely an archive page; the substantive text visible is the opening claim about cheap, low-latency AI.
What commenters are saying
The thread is divided. Several commenters defend Google's "democratizing" of LLMs and push back on treating cheap AI as harmful, with one listing Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Gemma, and Docs as benefits. Others argue centralization by a few giants is not democratization, and that "AI discovered a cure" stories have given way to layoff framing. A second camp respects the resignation as faith over career, including a commenter who says he partly disagrees with the author's AI-risk views but admires giving up a comfortable job.
Skeptics call the AI-doom framing histrionic or science-fiction-derived, while others cite Geoffrey Hinton's warnings and note the author was an insider for years. The author replies directly that he expects to use AI in future work but will not work on anything that accelerates it.