I have heard it described as a form of Pascal's wager. If you shout from the rooftops that LLMs are about to spawn a god machine, you get rewarded with attentio

I have heard it described as a form of Pascal's wager. If you shout from the rooftops that LLMs are about to spawn a god machine, you get rewarded with attention, and if you're a researcher, job opportunities. There isn't nearly as much room for critics right now. And if a few years down the line it turns out that you were wrong, everyone else was to, so no big deal. In fact, you can already see it happening. Scaling up LLMs was surely enough to get to AGI, but now that apparently OpenAI is working on Q*, it's obvious that LLMs alone aren't enough, but LLMs + Q* are!