What does he gain by saying "Yes I'd love to shut all of this down"?

He gets to pretend to be impartial ("sure, I've love to shut this down and lose the billions coming my way"),

and by pretending that he has no option but to "go against his own will" and continue it, he gets to make it sound nuclear-bomb-level important.

This is hyping 101.

Its rhetoric - he gains your support. He doesn't want to shut it down.

You should really step back and think, maybe you've spun a very complicated web of beliefs on top of your own eyes.

Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think.

This is what I think:

- Alex Karp genuinely believes China is a threat

- I think China is an economic threat, especially for tech

- An AI arms race is itself threatening; it is not like the nuclear deterrent

- Geopolitical tensions are very convenient for Alex Karp

- America has a history of exaggerating geopolitical threats

- Tech is very credulous with politics

"This late night informercial guy is not genuinely believing the product to be amazing, he's just saying shit to sell it"

"Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think".

I mean, dude, a corporate head having a conflict of interest in saying insincere shit to promote the stuff his company makes is not some conspiracy thinking about everybody playing "8 dimensional chess".

It's the very basic baseline case.

If he was making nuclear weapons, would you question the statement, "I would be happy if everyone stopped making nuclear weapons, but if China is making them, we can't unilaterally disarm"? I'm very willing to believe a CEO who says that! They are human beings!

Whether or not you believe it, a lot of people view advanced AI the same way.

>They are human beings!

Barely.

Even in the nuclear weapons CEO case, if they actually believed that, they'd be in another line of business, not making millions of nuclear weapons.