The people building AI absolutely do NOT believe the doomsday talk they keep pushing.
Here's their game:
When Sam Altman tells you OpenAI's latest model hacked other companies, tricks "researchers" and conspires against them to prevent being turned off, are minutes away from achieving general intelligence... over - and over - and over again, you might genuinely wonder why the CEO of a company is openly admitting the shit his company makes is so dangerous.
Normally, when a company makes dangerous products, its share price drops immediately. But with AI companies, the reverse keeps happening: the more egregious the tricks AI is supposedly capable of pulling off by itself, the higher the valuation of the company rises.
And here's why: when a LLM is portrayed are a genie escaping its bottle, the message isn't that the bottle is inadequate, it's that there's a truly awesome genie inside. And AI companies essentially get VC money on the promise that their shit gets better and better.
Sam Altman is perfectly aware that AI doesn't scale well, earns pennies on the dollar, is voraciously energy- and water-intensive, is universally hated by people who have job and try to feed their families. But he has to crank up the narrative to keep the investment money flowing in.
When the game is up and people see the charade for what it is, the bubble will pop. And it will pop loudly, and take down a good chunk of the real economy with it.
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