Spreading fear of an awesome power whose true danger is unproven is Religion 101.

Also scamming 101 for that matter, you want your mark to feel an immediate threat of overwhelmingly negative consequences so they'll buy whatever you're selling to prevent it. Silicon Valley directly makes tens of billions of USD literally serving scams to the public already, so I think it's fair to take most claims of doom with a pinch of salt.

It's also probably the correct approach to take with an awesome power whose true danger is unproven.

There are as many 'luminaries' on LeCun's side as there are on Hinton's. Andrew Ng, Pedro Domingos, Schmidhuber, and the list goes on.

Any time it seems to you that there are more people on the side of an issue that you happen to be on yourself, a good rule of thumb is to assume confirmation bias.

The list doesn't go on. I'll give you Ng and Schmidhuber, but your list pretty much ends there. Domingos isn't even a neural networks guy, and he's retired.

I agree that confirmation bias is a good working assumption in cases like this, but in this case we can conclusively reject that assumption. On the "worry about AI risk" side, we have the 33,705 signatories of https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime..., starting with Yoshua Bengio, Emad Mostaque, and John Hopfield, one of the few people to have actually won a Nobel for neural-networks work. And the 1386 signatories of https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/, starting with John Schulman, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Shengjia Zhao, Shane Legg, Ilya Sutskever, Mark Chen, Jasjeet Sekhon, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, Anca Dragan, Wojciech Zaremba, Dawn Song, Chris Olah, Laura Weidinger, Benjamin Mann, Stephanie Chan, Julian Schrittwieser, Summer Yue, and Jan Leike.

They might be wrong, but the demographics of the concern are pretty clear. AI existential risk is not a fringe concern raised by some group of Luddites due to their ignorance about the science, as in the black-hole risk of the LHC. It's primarily AI researchers, and especially the AI researchers who are working most closely with the most successful technologies.

By contrast, to come up with three more luminaries on LeCun's "side", you had to trot out a retired machine-learning professor who used to do research on Markov chains and Bayesian inference.