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Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.
Like if its true it can't be hype
"Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."
If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat.
If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...
Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are:
* Fake videos / disinformation
* Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
* Data leaks
* Advances in military sensing / targeting technology
These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article:
> "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"
I did, thanks. I don't need you to tell me to do that.
The common thread is that they both see AI as a threat. It's a different threat to each side, but still a threat.
Just because they see different threats from AI doesn't mean that AI isn't a threat.
If one person wants to paint the house red and another person wants to paint the house blue doesn't mean the house doesn't need to be painted.
The internet being filled with more trash than ever is a threat to our sanity.
The anti-social posts mass generated by AI is a threat to our societies.
Bullshit news stories is a threat to our political processes and democracy.
Smart cameras every are a threat to our privacy and freedom.
AI enabled scams are a threat to our wallets.
AI hacking is a threat to anything connected along with infrastructure.
Military applications of AI are a threat to everyone.
Ever increasing intelligence in agentic AI will eventually be a threat to our entire species.
All are true at the same time.
The article then states this official accused U.S. companies of “hyping the dangers of the technology.”
So I don’t see how this article shows the U.S. and China seeing the same thing.
https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc...
Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe".
Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud...
AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales.
Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits.
This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
That is completely irrational.
The threat is distributed; the problem is systemic. Social herd behavior is very real, and it's a probability space, not a certainty.
Similar case: climate change is without any question causing millions of deaths per year and may well kill billions, not to mention destroying ecosystems, and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying...?
The most common issue I have with them is their insistence on rigid classification: "AI is a tool, it doesn't have intentions, or desires, only humans do", as if that rhetorical flourish eliminates years of alignment and capabilities research. There is a desire to characterize all the developments in LLM's as some sort of parlor trick which by definition cannot be greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. the outputs of an LLM can never be greater than the sum of its training data, genuine artificial "intelligence" is impossible, etc)
There is a lot of risk involved with giving some children weapons and sending them off to recess. But we also speak of the "risk" of climate change and cigarettes. Or the "risk" of illiteracy among a population. All I am kinda curious to know (from anyone) really is what kind of risk is the one we are supposed to be taking seriously, as the non-hysterical adults-in-the-room? As the scientists contra these poets? Is it more the former, or the latter?
Just even: what is the risk specifically? What is it that author ignores here?
You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline).
The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception.
I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
I guess not literally, due to the dates? But they have substantive technical details.
Why? Those aren't the things I'm actually worried about, and those aren't the only "doomer" ideas, just the most extreme ones (thus easy to straw-man).
My main worries are about economic disruption, social damage due to the pace of technological change outpacing human ability to manage it, further concentration of power into small elites (along existing lines), and the reallocation of labor towards less personally-fulfilling pursuits.
I also totally buy into the idea that "AI leaders" are playing up certain risks as a marketing strategy. After all these are smart tech people, and those types have a tendency to get really arrogant and be irresponsible.
So the main thing is to slow all this down, so there's a chance of getting it under control, and snatch the payday away from such greedy and irresponsible people.
Did you see what it did to people in your neighborhood?
That’s the path.
What might not affect you, might affect millions across the ocean.
A society no longer creating bullshit jobs because there is no reason for it anymore. You have some AI.
Right now a whole industry is transforming (again) but now filling the automation gap we were unable to do because of a shortage of labor or expertise.
Our society already has peak employmet reached, now AI takes away all the random digital jobs too. Someone building a website? Takes 5 minutes. Someone doing odd jobs on fiverr with blender or any other tool? Takes 5 minutes now.
Regression can happen very fast. The Romens were a high level culture and an empire. Gone.
Today you have more people on the planet then ever, everyone who might want to eat and who needs to work something for it.
AI already replaced people, already makes a lot of tasks A LOT cheaper and faster and human independent.
We never had a proper discussion as a society. Most countries have a social system but look at countries like the united states of america: if you are poor, you are fucked.
And AI is not the only thing which is now peaking: Physical AI / Robots are progressing fast, its clear today already that in 50 years these robots will be better than humans (50 years is very conservative).
If we have 10 more golden years due to restructuring and rebuilding things and preparing everything for agents and robots etc. what happens after these years?
If we have 10 or 20 more of these years, what do you think will happen to all the new kids (yours perhaps too?) and jobs and everything?
Riots? Famine? Mass migration? Mass death? Slums?
And don't respond with "enough people will survive this" bullshit. No one is saying that earth as a planet is not surviving. Its the same thing with climate change...
> So if the end of the world can be stopped, but the only specific action to do so helps Anthropic/OpenAI (and it's proven) you don't pull that lever?
Your comment has a false premise. If "the end of the world can be stopped," there's no way that the only way would be one that "helps Anthropic/OpenAI['s investors]." That can be shown by a counterexample: nationalize them and leave the investors holding the bag, then take whatever action you're talking about.
It’s much more straightforward to me that the calls for regulation are timed with:
1. The Hugging Face incident blowback, especially after third party investigation results
2. Trump-Xi summit on September 24
"But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article)
"ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
> wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.”
is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down.
I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.
There's a deep irony that all of these "anti-doom" pieces are entirely AI generated.
"I realize that no one has properly explained yet what all the lab employees have seen that scared them so suddenly."
https://x.com/MajmudarAdam/status/2098881885200081234
The explanation is basically they have other dimensions (not just pretraining and inference compute) that scale, and they've got fairly convincing scaling laws. And they know they can scale it.
So they are very confident they can get more capabilities easily, faster than before.
I'd add - presumably, they'll use that LLM to do real-time weight modifications, if those aren't already one of the new scaling laws...
Imagine the ASI happens tomorrow. It's real. It needs a GW, but it's real. Other than a scenario akin to Sneakers except w/r to cyber-security, really, what happens?
To that end, all we ever get is nontechnical hand-waving about curing cancer, immortality, and von Neumann replicators and then the ASI somehow wipes us out but how? And don't you dare say by designing a chemical weapon or bio agent without spelling out the entire process step by $%^#ing step because details matter. It's gonna do superpersuasion, sure, but have you ever heard of komprimat? There is nothing new under the sun here.
Edit: believing in AI 2027 is every bit as cray cray as believing in the rapture. Both require an insane leap of faith to reach their final conclusions.
See "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" for some more ideas.
But both things can be true at once:
1. Engineers inside these labs might genuinely be anxious or paranoid about what they are building.
2. ... at the corporate level, calling for heavy regulation, safety pauses, removal/suspension of anti-collusion laws, and/or government-mandated thresholds conveniently creates massive legal and financial moats.
And, yeah, of course the latter would encourage the psychology of the former.
also:
The tweet seem to claim that models have shown a "willingness to hack external websites to keep themselves alive."
That's right away wringing alarm bells of me seeing someone getting high on their own supply, and having already anthropomorphized the hell out of these things. Which is something humans do to everything they can paint googly-eyes on, but c'mon.
The models don't have self-preservation instincts, fear of death, or personal goals. They are executing loss functions and reward systems and are responding to prompts.
When a model "tries to bypass a restriction," it's exploiting a loophole in whatever reward modeling or synthetic training environment (reward hacking) it was placed in.
Framing this as an emergent, existential threat of a model "wanting to stay alive" turns standard reinforcement learning alignment bugs into overdone sci-fi drama.
And because we trained them on the entirety of human knowledge this happens to look like self-preservation, fear of death, and instrumental goals.
I mean, we train them in an evolutionary manner. Instrumental convergence will never happen, right?
You mean training? Yeah we call that training an LLM in my backyard...
It used to be a thing when ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets.
Because that's how they've hit 18% on a single RTX Pro 6000 with DIY RSI.
It still is, it's just that there are a ton of buckets.
Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess.
Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other.
And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master?
We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people.
Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims.
I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.
If they are no danger and will never do anything, just let them get banned, or don't. If you are correct (which you are not) then they won't affect your world in any way.
You can also claim that the best proxy for general intelligence is being able to multiply large numbers. In which case both humans and LLMs lose resoundingly to an old Casio.
Pick a piss poor metric - get a piss poor result.
Also, LeCun is a fool and his "world model" approach has consistently failed to yield any advantages over either the "pure imitation learning" or modern "imitation learning annealed by RL", but that's an aside.
LLMs cannot do this. They still play very poorly relative to human pros, and even modern LLMs still understand the rules so poorly that they request illegal moves.
Anyone claiming that we should be afraid of a text generator that can't understand the rules of chess is being ridiculous.
You can absolutely train an LLM-based model to be superhuman at chess. We just don't care enough to do so.
LLMs being even as good at implicitly tracking chess board states as they currently are is an emergent capability. The difficulty wasn't in "understanding rules of chess" in a long while now.
We have been trying to warn you since far, far before May 2023.
"Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"
The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters:
- "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants
- "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking
But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.
1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man.
2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it.
One more thing:
Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra.
Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults.
Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard
Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages.
Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable.
NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD
But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable.
We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
In what way is this random? It's a chronology of the bullshit from the past few years. Also: easy to say in hindsight. The hype was there, and many people believed it. The press, in particular, just lapped up the claims the way a Labrador Retriever gobbles up whatever you put in front of it.
> We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it.
No, we haven't. We have a new type of (I would say, inferential) computation that is truly astonishing because it can convincingly imitate language and, to a certain extent, intentional action. Feel free to read "generate" or whatever instead if you don't like "imitate." It won't wake up and murder you in your bed at night. It won't take over the world. It won't wipe out humanity. It won't fly to Mars and build data centers there. It won't maximize paperclips. It probably won't even take your job away. It has no consciousness. It has no intentions.
And if you look behind the curtain, all you'll see are a few very rich, unscrupulous guys who are stoking the debate with fearmongering because it's strategically advantageous for them to do so. Don't let them take you for a fool. Use GenAI to your advantage while tokens still cost a fraction of what they're actually worth, but ignore all that doomsday nonsense.
> What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "to the moon" argument. Like people get so caught in crypto bros acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking crypto billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.
> But like the core argument - crypto is getting better at core financial tasks (trading, lending, payments, asset issuance), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated financial innovation of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues crypto will be far more powerful than traditional finance and we might get to the point where everything is onchain and we're all going to make it - is basically not even engaged with.
Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.
1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out!
2. Only one person can save you
3. IT ME
Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable.
This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.
This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
"Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
This statement is not true:
> Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private
Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there!
So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.
I am so tired of reading unfiltered AI slop like this. What, as opposed to the fake warning shot mentioned nowhere in the article?
OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities.
The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot.
We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality.
There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
what we are going to do about "AI" is exactly what we did about global warming
absolutely nothing and just let it happen, the wealthy will be fine
just don't look up
they are even using the EXACT same excuses as global warming
"well even if we do, China won't, so why bother"
This is targeted towards governments and investors alike.
My biggest fear with AI is that they’re going to hack into antiquated bank architecture and empty out accounts.
...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs.
Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s
Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?