Goodbye Google
A senior engineer has resigned from Google DeepMind, citing ethical concerns that the rapid acceleration of AI development poses significant risks to humanity. The author argues that while AI capabilities are advancing quickly, the potential for existential and societal harm outweighs the unclear benefits, making continued work on the technology irresponsible. Following the resignation, the individual plans to focus on debugging tools and other projects that are unambiguously pro-human.
- ▪The author resigned from Google DeepMind because their team's goal to reduce AI costs and latency conflicts with their belief that AI progress is currently too rapid.
- ▪The individual states that moving to a different project within Google was not feasible due to their location in New Zealand, where the company does not conduct engineering work.
- ▪The author expresses concern about specific AI risks, including reward hacking, misalignment, and the potential for cognitive surrender and economic disruption.
- ▪Despite the resignation, the author acknowledges that their individual departure will have a minimal impact on the overall pace of AI development but believes it is a necessary moral stance.
- ▪The author plans to continue maintaining the Pernosco and rr debugging tools and to investigate how AI systems currently handle code debugging.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ocallahan |
| Canonical URL | https://robert.ocallahan.org/2026/09/goodbye-google.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:52:02 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-25T05:45:29.086Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-25T05:45:29.086Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Thursday 24 September 2026 Goodbye Google Today I’m sending the following email: I’m resigning from Google today. This has not been an easy decision. I love my colleagues and my work environment, and being paid handsomely to solve fun puzzles has been amazing. But my team’s goal is ultimately to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and I don’t think that’s good for people right now: I firmly believe AI progress is currently far too rapid (and I have doubts about the destination too). It’s practically impossible for me to move to a different Google project that wouldn’t accelerate AI (partly due to my ties to New Zealand, where Google prefers not to do engineering), so my hands are tied.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ocallahan.
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