Mr. Yudkowsky is a controversial figure who a lot of AI Safety people tend to distance themselves from because he has a tendency to exaggerate for rhetorical effect, which means that he ends up “preaching to the choir” while pushing away people in the general public who might be open to learning about AI x-risk scenarios but haven’t made up their mind yet.
But I’d like to publicly thank Mr. Yudkowsky and say that even if he has fallen out of favor for being too extreme (kind of like Richard Stallman), Mr. Yudkowsky was one of the 3 or 4 people most central to creating the field of AI safety, and without him, OpenAI and Anthropic would not exist.
https://x.com/esyudkowsky/status/1725630614723084627?s=46
Mr. Yudkowsky is a controversial figure who a lot of AI Safety people tend to distance themselves from because he has a tendency to exaggerate for rhetorical effect, which means that he ends up “preaching to the choir” while pushing away people in the general public who might be open to learning about AI x-risk scenarios but haven’t made up their mind yet.
But I’d like to publicly thank Mr. Yudkowsky and say that even if he has fallen out of favor for being too extreme (kind of like Richard Stallman), Mr. Yudkowsky was one of the 3 or 4 people most central to creating the field of AI safety, and without him, OpenAI and Anthropic would not exist.