– AI will kill us all
What amazes me is not that yet again an AI researcher leaves one of the big labs to warn on national television that “AI will kill us all”, or to disappear into the mountains to write poetry. It’s the completely uncritical, unreflective platforming that the media gives these stories.
Perfect career pivot: spend barely three years in the industry, leave with a doom-and-gloom post on X, watch it go viral, take some softball questions from Anderson Cooper, and profit. To be fair, he walked away from his Anthropic equity (by his own words). We can only assume that his OpenAI stake keeps climbing with every new hype cycle.
And then, by pure coincidence of course, just a few days later Amodei publishes “We Must Pace the Frontier”. Within hours Altman, Musk and everyone else agrees. There’s a word for competitors (public and soon-to-be public) agreeing among themselves to restrict output.
Once again the news outlets repeat the tweets word for word, without pausing for one minute on the “why”, as if there were no deeper intent behind them.