Yeah the thing about the future is that it's in the future? Considering all the people who say things like "AGI will take a century" and "superintelligence is impossible", like, Eliezer also did not call ChatGPT but this world surely looks more like the one he predicted than the one his detractors predicted. There's a reason so many of the people working at current AI orgs got into AI by reading Eliezer.

Also: how dare they have fun.

You make a good point, the correct response to “there’s a legitimately strange long-running cult around this Eliezer guy that long predates his proclamations about ChatGPT” is “yeah, have you heard about this Eliezer guy?”

Edit: You do make an interesting point though, Eliezer can predict the future. He is the only one that predicted that technology would advance to the point that humans will at times debate about the future.

Further, nobody but Eliezer Yudkowsky was able to predict a future in which Eliezer Yudkowsky would be popularly considered instrumental to the future of artificial intelligence. It is spooky how no other futurist predicted his rise to prominence, which is further proof of his prescience.