The resignation post is three hundred and forty-six words long, and Jacob rewrote the last line nine times before settling on put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions? It read as brave at eight PM yesterday. At 7:40 in the morning today, with the empty Anthropocentric tumbler in his hand, it reads like something a person would say before going out for coffee.
That is the plan. Down the hill to Fillmore, the place with the good cortados, and after that the rest of his life.
On the landing he checks his phone. The post has been shared one hundred and eighty thousand times, none of them by people he knows. Under it sits the text he sent Dana at the Journal just before posting: hey. weird ask. might be a small human-interest thing here? happy to chat. Her reply came in at 5:52 a.m.: oh no.
He took that for sympathy.
He opens the door and the sidewalk is full.
Twenty of them, maybe more, packed onto the steps of a Victorian that was cut into six units in 1978 and has never had this many people on its stoop at once. Two boom mics, three tripods, a man with a network lanyard over a fleece vest, a kid holding up a phone with a ring light clipped to it. The September fog is still sitting on the hill and all of them are in it. Dana is at the back in the gray hoodie she has owned since junior year, and she lifts one hand in a gesture that could mean hello or could mean I tried.
“Jacob!” The fleece vest gets there first. “Will Anthropocentric be able to survive after losing access to your critical skills?”
He looks at the microphone. Foam windscreen, logo cube.
“I was there for four months,” he says. “I want to be accurate about that. There are thousands of researchers. All of them are still there. All of them minus one.”
“Sources are describing your departure as a significant blow to the company.”
“Which sources?”
“How long until the rest of the industry follows you out?”
“Is this the beginning of the end for frontier AI?”
“I don’t think that’s...” He hunts for the end of the sentence. “It was one person. Me. It was just me, leaving.”
The ring-light kid angles the phone. “Chat wants to know if you were working on the model that’s going to kill everyone.”
“I was still onboarding.” This is true, and he can hear how it sounds. “I built a dashboard. I cleaned up some documentation. I ran a reading group. Four people came to the reading group.”
“Was the documentation critical to safety?”
“It was just documentation.”
The woman with the boom mic brings the foam down until it nearly touches his chin. “What did you do at the company that they are now unable to do without you?”
He lifts the tumbler, because it is in his hand and because the morning has taken on the shape of a thing he cannot steer. “Uhh…I made the coffee. First one in on the floor, every morning. So.”
The change in the crowd is physical. Twenty heads tip forward by a few degrees.
“Who is making the coffee now, Jacob?”
“Was there a succession plan for the coffee?”
“Can you confirm the safety team is currently uncaffeinated?”
“Would you describe yourself as the single point of failure for morning coffee at Anthropocentric?”
He says no. He says it was a drip machine. He says anyone could do it, that was the joke, the joke was that it didn’t matter. The fleece vest writes drip machine on a pad and underlines it. The ring-light kid reads from his stream: “Coffee guy. Coffee guy. Okay, everyone’s saying coffee guy.”
He stops correcting. The questions keep coming and he lets them go past like weather. The foam cube drifts. A tripod resets.
“Okay,” he says. “That’s what I’ve got.”
He steps down off the stoop and the pack opens for him, and closes again behind. Then the boom mic finds him one more time.
“Jacob. What’s next for you?”
He looks at the tumbler. Empty since he carried it out of the building last night, the one thing he took.
“I guess I’m gonna head to a coffee shop,” he says.