I'm sorry it sounds antagonistic, but the negativity and "it's too late and we're all going to die no matter what we do" nihilism, is having the effect of sensationalizing the issue in ways that have been incredibly counterproductive.
Here's what happened the last time technology was going to destroy us all:
"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming." —Stephen Hawking
I'm not trying to make fun of Eliezer and co., but we have to have some proper perspective. We don't do that very well these days, because end-of-the-world scenarios are good for clicks.
Hawking's statement was made after the confirmation of the Higgs, and is still valid. A metastability vacuum event could be a problem (that's putting it lightly, hah) at high enough energies. It might have already happened, elsewhere.
They're absolutely hysterical. Convenient for them, and for the companies, the hysteria is to their benefit. More money to fund the MIRI for Yudowsky, and regulatory capture for the companies who believe they're ahead if you can convince some dementia-ridden Sentor to pass the bill regulating some vague notion of "AI safety."
There's some people in these companies who understand that they have no moat, and that you can't make GPUs illegal, as demonstrated by the most recent story about the leaked google post, and that people can outperform their models in an hour with a LoRA on a workstation laptop for a given task, that the cat is out of the bag. But, with the hysteria of the media, where interns straight out of the shithole of liberal arts believe that a post on reddit or twitter where someone was slighted at the dinner table is breaking news, we're now in this situation where we have calls for regulation for something people simply don't understand, no thanks to the useless media.
Here's what happened the last time technology was going to destroy us all:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a11217/what-stephen...
"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming." —Stephen Hawking
I'm not trying to make fun of Eliezer and co., but we have to have some proper perspective. We don't do that very well these days, because end-of-the-world scenarios are good for clicks.