But unfortunately, too many people who are already too rich for their own good have fully bought into it.
I have a secret: if you don't use AI, the new releases aren't very impressive. I'm bored out of my mind with people doing galaxy brain memes every 2 months while on the whole.... they're still boring zombies, and only getting boring-er and boring-er. There's nothing more boring than being impressed by the latest AI model.
In terms of the projections being insane you can quantify it: each model costs something to train, but after that the training has only captured so much unique new value in terms of model capability, and the race is on to drain that value as rapidly as possible. Everyone is competing to drain the same value. This generation of models makes slop video games for example, and slop video games rapidly became the most boring thing on the planet.
Those are genuine breakthroughs.
Any society-wide productivity gain was lost when software engineers ceased collaborating with each other in good faith. In OSS, they stopped collaborating. At companies, they stopped collaborating. One by one, in silence, alone, we have been bereft of our vision, our team spirit, our passion, our uniqueness. We no longer have the will to serve others, or even to serve each other. We stopped building our future. We will accept whatever society AI makes for use like fucking cattle or lemmings or like dogs.
AI hasn't elevated humanity, it has taken a massive dump on it.
Except that's an open invitation to get sued into oblivion by your investors.
Of course they don't actually believe their nonsense about AIs doomsday hokey, so full speed ahead.
The CEOs of these companies are largely just talking heads and generally interchangeable / hot-swappable with anyone willing to give it a shot.
The importance of CEOs is largely overstated.
If you wanted to test your hypothesis, you would have to find a situation where leadership change wasn't caused by strategy change.
There definitely are many things wrong with that, of course. Lighting someone else's money on fire and walking away is highly unethical.
The real question is: what are the motivations for companies to pretend that their AI is world-ending, and what do they want out of the disquiet caused by them saying that?
Well that certainly tracks with what I know about these people and their twisted philosophy.