"I am refusing to work on Cloud TPUs" by Yair Halberstadt

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"I am refusing to work on Cloud TPUs" by Yair Halberstadt

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I don't think this is particularly impressive or interesting for anyone else, but I think it may turn out to be useful in the future to have an easily visible public record of what happened, so here goes:

I am an L5 SWE at Google Israel. I have been there since May 2021, was promoted once, and have never received a negative annual or quarterly review (ranging from a rating of Significant Impact to Outstanding Impact).

I have been worried for a long time about the development of artificial intelligence, as can be seen by many of my posts on this website. I believe that above human intelligence AI may well have the motive and means to wipe out humanity, and that developing AI is the most consequential thing that people have ever done. It is imperative we tread slowly and carefully, but right now top AI labs are racing to get there as fast as they can, which is likely to lead to disaster.

My wider team (~60 people) at Google was recently reassigned from working on supporting migration to Google Cloud, to improving the enterprise customer experience for Cloud TPUs. This is the platform which external customers [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 13th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wM5vbT9evBhM3fP3x/i-am-refusing-to-work-on-cloud-tpus

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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