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> I’m disappointed in the level of groupthink reflexive cynicism I see from commenters any time prominent AI leaders talk about AI risks and the need for regulation or pacing.

Maybe it's not "groupthink reflexive cynicism" if you feel the need to address the obvious conflict of interest of the AI leaders in each of your paragraphs. Why did they launch this coordinated AI safety campaign, starting with Jacob Coxon's tweet?

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This is a fine example of how rational good faith can quickly turn into naivety.

Consider the massive power and wealth differentials these companies stand to gain if they "win".

When the other participants have given up all reason and reasonable bounds on power, you'd do well to abandon any pretense of generous interpretation. Now is the time for critical analysis, not faith in the inherent "goodness" of someone whose entire job is presently to make as much money as possible by disrupting literally the entire white collar industry and who stands to gain much more than you or I do, and let's not forget, this outstanding success would never have happened without our work.

Keep in mind this is not a person who thought "wow, this is an existential threat, I'd better not contribute to building this". If anything Dario's past alarm ringing only proves that he's not really doing this in good faith. Otherwise he would have stopped a long time ago. The most generous interpretation of his behavior is that he literally thinks only anthropic is responsible and smart enough to build and control this stuff which...yeah, that should be pretty telling (esp. when you consider their recent security mishaps).

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He talks too much and as a result it's looked like pre-IPO hype and disingenuous because if he believed what he says then he'd stop.

Now, someone is going to say but the investors and obligation to be first; and I would say exactly. The cynicism is well deserved and I think people are tired of what could be suggested is your group think take often called the status quo.

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??? I bet investors are extremely happy that anthropic pledged to give an outside company full access to their IP, in order to slow down their own iteration speed. Investors looooove oversight for a company they invest in. I wonder why no other company does stuff like this
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> disingenuous because if he believed what he says then he'd stop.

Why do you think so?

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Because I find the cognitive dissonance of saying it's dangerous while flying as fast as possible to an IPO too much to take. I just don't understand how others parse this differently.
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So you're saying that if Dario truly thought what he says he does, he'd resign/dissolve the company somehow/unilaterally slow down? I see two problems with this:

First, Dario thinks that OpenAI will continue racing even if he stops, so there is, by his values, no point in stopping. Do you disagree with this, and think he should stop anyway?

Second, what's your take on, for example, Jacob Coxon, who did resign from Anthropic a few days ago after realizing they aren't being responsible? Do you agree that he, at least, does believe in AI risk?

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I get it. I do. I just believe we live in a world where our corporate leaders speak out of both sides of their mouths. And typically, people who get to these positions are not the Jacob Coxon's of the world.

That is to say, I've been places where I tried really hard within teams to change certain things that I thought were broken only to find out that what the leadership said and how they acted were divorced from my and many others experiences. And so I did leave in those instances (and please read this not as I didn't get my way but total dysfunction behind beautiful facades).

So, I do think if he really felt as he felt he'd do something different than ultimately yelling "somebody stop me!".

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This thread is a testament to the travesty of how bad HN discourse has gotten. It's become an echo chamber of knee-jerk cynical sneering. All the heads of the labs (Sama, Dario, Demis Hassabis, Ilya, Musk) agree with the risks to humanity's existence. Most of the core employees agree. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Bernie Sanders agree. These issues have been discussed in more intelligent channels for a decade now, and still after all the incredible mathematics and coding progress that is improving incredibly fast every 6 months, this forum is fundamentally unserious. You will not find prescient views in the HN majority anymore, for many years now. The people intelligent, prescient, and forward thinking enough, skating to where the puck was going, to be involved in shaping the future of AGI are elsewhere and barely involved in this place from how badly it's gotten. The inventor of RLHF [0], and newest board member of OpenAI, wasn't on HN, they were on LessWrong.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741

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