zlacker

Important to pay attention to the content of the alarm though. Altman went in front of congress and a Senator said “when you say things could go badly, I assume you are talking about jobs”. Many people are alarmed about disinformation, job destruction, bias, etc.

Actually holding an x-risk belief is still a fringe position, most people still laugh it off.

That said, the Overton Window is moving. The Time piece from Yudkowsky was something of a milestone (even if it was widely ridiculed).

>>thepti+(OP)
Altman also has very selfish motivation, because when there is now AI regulation, only Google, OpenAI (Microsoft) and maybe Meta are allowed to build “compliant” AI. It’s called regulatory capture.

* EU passed its AI regulation directive recently and it has been bashed already here on HackerNews

>>thepti+(OP)
> Actually holding an x-risk belief is still a fringe position

Beliving it is an x-risk is not fringe. It's pretty mainstream now that there is a _risk_ of an existential level event. The fringe is more like Yudkowsky or Leahy insisting that there is a near certainty of such an event if we continue down the current path.

With Hinton, Bengio, Sutskever and Hassabis and Altman all agreeing that there exists a non-trivial existential risk (even if their opinions vary with respect to the magnitude), it seems more like this represents the mainstream.

>>miohta+KC
Sam doesn't have much financial upside from OpenAI (reportedly, he doesn't have any equity).

And he wrote about the risk in 2015 months before OpenAI was founded: https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2

Fine if you disagree with his arguments, but why assume you know what his motivation is?

>>matt_h+TG
I find it highly unlikely that he has less upside than the employees who also don’t have equity, but do have profit participation units.

>>trasht+fD
I think it’s not fringe amongst experts and those in the field. It’s absolutely still fringe among the general public, and I think it’s outside the Overton Window (ie politicians aren’t talking about it).

>>thepti+bv4
The Overton Window applies to the general public, and maybe particular the press.

And this is all over the press and other media now, both the old and new, left leaning and right leaning. I would say it's pretty well within the Overton Window.

Politicians in the US are a bit behind. They probably just need to run the topic with some polls and voter study groups to decide what opinions are most popular with their voter bases.