AI leaders can’t sell doom and expect applause
The founders of AI companies have repeatedly told the public their product could replace them or worse. Now they seem baffled when people take them at their word.
In May 2023, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and hundreds of other AI researchers and executives signed a one-sentence public statement. It read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The people running the world’s largest AI companies put their names to a document that slotted their own product alongside smallpox and thermonuclear exchange. They did so voluntarily. Nobody held a gun to their heads.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been especially candid. “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world,” he said at a conference in 2015, “but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies”.
If he was joking, it was ill-advised. On the StrictlyVC podcast in 2023, he said the bad case was “lights out for all of us”. At a Senate subcommittee hearing the same year, he said that if the technology goes wrong, it can go “quite wrong”.
