I'm old enough to remember when people dismissed all the doom coming from these companies as "marketing". (A thing many of them have been entirely consistent about since GPT-2, or indeed earlier given the founding documents).

I know a few people around these circles; People like this are quite sincere about the risk, and that they think poorly of their bosses and how risk is being handled.

"Think poorly" is such an odd response here.

Like, if people were genuinely doing a thing that had such a large probability of killing all humans... they should all be in prison. Heck, vigilanteism would start to look compelling. I do not understand how somebody can really think "well this is likely to doom all of us so we need to get there as fast as possible because we are, without evidence, the most capable people of controlling this thing."

I mean much more generally than doom.

It's like, Altman's reputation in general is not great, and that includes people who've worked there.

But this is marketing. This is just pre-IPO talk.

Anthropic’s goal is not anything to do with AI, it is purely to generate more profit than any other company.

Securing/lobbying to regulate their competitors through doom talk, or promising that they will bankrupt every other company because AI will “do it all, better than everyone else” is purely for investment purpose.

As long as their incentive is monetary, it’s not unreasonable to believe this is just marketing.

Normally, businesses spend a lot of money saying "no, our products are 100% safe" and get very upset with people who say they are not.

You are literally looking at someone who resigned because the company is acting unsafely, where other people from the same company are responding to this by saying "we agree, this is all very unsafe", in a community where all the various competitors have signed public statements saying "this is unsafe", where people who have Nobel prizes are saying "this is unsafe", where the philosophical centre of mass in the current research community circles around MIRI and LessWrong where the founders made the book "if anyone builds it, everyone dies" because they are so very tired of having to explain that they mean literally, where one of the major independent research organisations is "Model Evaluation and Threat Research", and where the major model makers have been sued for harm already caused by their systems and in one case have been ordered by the US government to prevent people accessing their model because they thought it was too dangerous.

A normal business would be shut down by almost any of these things independently, let alone all of them together. This remains true regardless of whether or not the leaders are psychopathic enough to think this is a good marketing campaign or not.

If this doesn't convince you there's a risk, what on earth would convincing you even look like?

Well obviously that's why they still pursue it. That's a major chunk of the other 90%.

Because it will create enormous prosperity for capital holders. Everyone else - talk to your congressman.

“Vast economic disruption” is not quite the good marketing angle it appears to be.