AI Leaders' Doom Talk Is Just Another Form of Hype
For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
A media scholar argues that apocalyptic warnings from AI leaders like Anthropic's Evan Hubinger are not honest predictions but a strategic genre: apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and productive in effect. The pattern spans 2023–2026, from the Center for AI Safety's extinction statement to OpenAI shipping GPT-6 Astra the same week its chief scientist urged extreme caution. The critique draws on Bender and Hanna's The AI Con, Whittaker's 'ghost stories as advertisements,' and Narayanan and Kapoor's 'AI as Normal Technology,' while noting real incidents of containment failure and labor-market harms that get crowded out.
Doom is a form of hype.
- NoahZuniga
> I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense ... . As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world ... . My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing
Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.
Like if its true it can't be hype
- atleastoptimal
This article reads like it was written by Claude.
Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits.
This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
- mrinterweb
The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time. Chinese labs are releasing open models that are nipping at the heals of the frontier models. Anthropic and OpenAI know these frontier class open weight models can threaten their valuations by changing inference to a commodity where the provider who can serve the best models the cheapest and fastest will win. Few are going to pay $50/million tokens when they could pay <$1/million tokens for similar outcomes. There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI, IMO.
- apsec112
The sources that this article cites have aged very badly and the author doesn't seem to have noticed this
"But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article)
"ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
- swingboy
Can anyone from a lab anonymously confirm they have or are insanely close to real-time weight modifications and still using the same architecture every other lab is using (transformers)?
- thenthenthen
The doom is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed
- carodgers
There's been substantial effort put into designing and running benchmarks for these models. You know which one they don't report any more? Chess ELO.
Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess.
Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
- AJ007
Consider the messaging it took to attract AI researchers to OpenAI in the beginning, the exodus to Anthropic, and why Google, Meta, etc fail to recruit top researchers and the retain them. Reconcile all of this with the mammoth valuations of Anthropic and (previously non-profit) OpenAI and it all starts sounding a lot like "don't be evil." These guys never really believed any of this, did they? (not referring to the researchers)