9 ms·

For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype

131 points by luk4 13d ago

ceeam 13d ago
"Here's our new AI" - "But does it run doom?"
- jimmydoe 13d ago
  we need a Doom-bench if it does not exist already (there are a few ones for RPG I think I saw)
cwnyth 13d ago
After fruit fly brain news, can you blame me for initially thinking this was about the video game?
- Applejack 13d ago
  Read it the exam same
- broodbucket 13d ago
  Given Doom is capitalised in the title but the rest of the title isn't in title case, not at all, it's a sensible way for your brain to read it.
rvz 13d ago
Or it is their entire IPO roadshow.
swingboy 13d ago
Can anyone from a lab anonymously confirm they have or are insanely close to real-time weight modifications and still using the same architecture every other lab is using (transformers)?
- Betelbuddy 13d ago
  >> real-time weight modifications You mean training? Yeah we call that training an LLM in my backyard...
  - fooker 13d ago
    We don't really train deployed models in realtime in any realistic sense nowadays. It used to be a thing when ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets.
    - bigfishrunning 13d ago
      > ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets. It still is, it's just that there are a ton of buckets.
    - LogicFailsMe 13d ago
      May I introduce you to the word of our lord the arc-agi-3 kaggle competition? Because that's how they've hit 18% on a single RTX Pro 6000 with DIY RSI.
      - fooker 13d ago
        Where can I read more about this?
        LogicFailsMe 13d ago
        https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2026-arc-agi-3 https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2026-arc-agi-3
  - swingboy 13d ago
    You don’t know the difference between train and test time? I asked for somebody from a lab.
    - 13d ago
5eu5yu5u 13d ago
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deleted 13d ago
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fooker 13d ago
Reminder that they have been doing this schtick since GPT2. This is targeted towards governments and investors alike.
mercurywells 13d ago
How does that compare/contrast to the nuclear physicists speaking out during the early part of the 20th century?
- applfanboysbgon 13d ago
  The nuclear physicists were not banking on getting a trillion dollars invested in them by speaking out, for one. "Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
  - pixl97 13d ago
    Um, guess you never heard of the Manhattan project.
    - applfanboysbgon 13d ago
      Perhaps you'd like to educate me? How many scientists from the Manhattan project were made into millionaires/billionaires owing to their ownership stake in it? When exactly did nuclear weapons go to market as a commercial product targeted at enterprises and consumers around the world?
- simonwsimonwsim 13d ago
  [dead]
AJ007 13d ago
Consider the messaging it took to attract AI researchers to OpenAI in the beginning, the exodus to Anthropic, and why Google, Meta, etc fail to recruit top researchers and the retain them. Reconcile all of this with the mammoth valuations of Anthropic and (previously non-profit) OpenAI and it all starts sounding a lot like "don't be evil." These guys never really believed any of this, did they? (not referring to the researchers)
ck2 13d ago
the short answer is what we are going to do about "AI" is exactly what we did about global warming absolutely nothing and just let it happen, the wealthy will be fine just don't look up they are even using the EXACT same excuses as global warming "well even if we do, China won't, so why bother"
- b40d-48b2-979e 13d ago
  Say heyooo to a 3°C El Niño...
NoahZuniga 13d ago
> I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense ... . As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world ... . My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype. Like if its true it can't be hype
- phoghed 13d ago
  Why not? Why can’t the believe their statements and also use them to generate hype? If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
- zer00eyz 13d ago
  > Like if its true it can't be hype https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perception-of-crime-exceeds-the-reality https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc... Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe". Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud... AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales. Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
- reaperducer 13d ago
  Like if its true it can't be hype I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat. If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-security-risks-anthropic.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...
francisofascii 13d ago
Similar to Y2K?
Suhinnall27 13d ago
[flagged]
apsec112 13d ago
All of the main characters here (Dario, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk) have been saying this for over ten years now, since before OpenAI or Anthropic even existed
- ACCount39 13d ago
  This. They've been saying "AI is an extremely powerful, extremely dangerous technology" back when actual AIs were image classifiers that would struggle to tell a cupcake apart from a dog. OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities. The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot. We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality. There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
  - reducesuffering 13d ago
    Yep, anyone who thinks these leaders are only saying this now for marketing purposes hasn't even done a cursory 15 minute investigation into whether their beliefs are verifiably false.
mrinterweb 13d ago
The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time. Chinese labs are releasing open models that are nipping at the heals of the frontier models. Anthropic and OpenAI know these frontier class open weight models can threaten their valuations by changing inference to a commodity where the provider who can serve the best models the cheapest and fastest will win. Few are going to pay $50/million tokens when they could pay <$1/million tokens for similar outcomes. There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI, IMO.
- palmotea 13d ago
  > The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time....There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
  - LogicFailsMe 13d ago
    Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
    - frabcus 13d ago
      I think either "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" meet your criteria? I guess not literally, due to the dates? But they have substantive technical details.
      - goatlover 13d ago
        Do the experts in the relevant fields agree with the "substantive" technical details on how the entire human race can be made extinct?
ianm218 13d ago
What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "doomers" argument. Like people get so caught in people acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking West Coast billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out. But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 13d ago
  Two things: 1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man. 2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it. One more thing: Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
  - Gregkion 13d ago
    2. Astra just came out and Fable 5/5.1 too. These are SIGNIFICANT better in plenty of tasks than Opus in November. Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra. Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults. Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages. Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable. NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable. We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
twodave 13d ago
Such a load of baloney. I don’t care what kind of controls you put in place, if ASI is ever achieved how do you think it will respond to being caged? The only option I can conceive of is to embrace it and hope it turns out to either be out of reach or benevolent towards its own creators. There is no putting the cork back in at this point.
meep_meep_meep 13d ago
I thought that too for a long time, but after the Hugging Face attack and given the proximity to Anthropic IPO, if this was hype then they are morons. This is guaranteed to cause massive backlash.
deleted 13d ago
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thatmf 13d ago
The mea culpas are quite exhausting too. "Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"
ctoth 13d ago
> May 2023 — the founding text. We have been trying to warn you since far, far before May 2023.
schainks 13d ago
The cult-like behavior we're seeing from these "AI Leaders": 1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out! 2. Only one person can save you 3. IT ME Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable. This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.
- shimman 13d ago
  Yeah, this is how fascists talk and with seeing how this technology has done nothing to improve society (in fact all it seems to be doing is immiserating workers, enabling a surveillance society, and quite useful in helping target children at schools for drone strikes) it's not hard to be not only immediately skeptical but to resist it in the most extreme forms. This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
  - schainks 13d ago
    Foregoing anesthesia before a root canal appears to have emboldened them.
agentultra 13d ago
I think we’re more likely to die of starvation from economic collapse, heat related stress, and complications from Long COVID than an algorithm waking up and destroying us. Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.
atleastoptimal 13d ago
This article reads like it was written by Claude. Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits. This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
- goatlover 13d ago
  > they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
  - frabcus 13d ago
    Yes, that's why the rest of society needs to make them pause.
- phoghed 13d ago
  The author specifically calls out that the analysis is done by perplexity
- mlsu 13d ago
  If you actually believe that your invention will lead to the extinction of humanity, you would be acting very very differently. Namely, you would not be inventing the thing that you think is going to kill all of humanity, and probably you would be doing everything in your power to prevent it from being invented, up to and including sabotage of the company that YOU work for, which is currently trying to invent that thing. And yet, here's Fable 6, more capable than ever before, oh BTW we are IPOing, oh, BTW, I have stock options...
  - mrob 13d ago
drgo 13d ago
I wonder if this an indication that they’re worried about securing enough funding to keep developing models that need upgrading every few weeks.
vermarish 13d ago
> July-August 2026: the warning shot that was real I am so tired of reading unfiltered AI slop like this. What, as opposed to the fake warning shot mentioned nowhere in the article?
pizza234 13d ago
> and it concerns containment failure, reward hacking, and evaluation integrity, a governance and engineering problem, rather than machine malevolence. The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters: - "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants - "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking
apsec112 13d ago
The sources that this article cites have aged very badly and the author doesn't seem to have noticed this "But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article) "ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
- matherial 13d ago
  The author appears to be an LLM. This seems to be a 100% AI-generated article, which makes the "as a media scholar" passage especially hilarious.
  - raddan 13d ago
    If the author is an LLM, it’s a really bad one. > wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down. I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.
- dwohnitmok 13d ago
  Well it's because the article is AI-generated. Same with the Sacks tweet that was on the front page yesterday. There's a deep irony that all of these "anti-doom" pieces are entirely AI generated.
carodgers 13d ago
There's been substantial effort put into designing and running benchmarks for these models. You know which one they don't report any more? Chess ELO. Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess. Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
- Gregkion 13d ago
  It doesn't really matter if it will be an LLM or Lecuns world model. Lecuns world model, if its the right architecture, will be retrained by google, anthropic and co with the massive amount of compute they have and the massive amount of data. Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other. And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master? We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people. Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
  - deleted 13d ago
    [deleted]
  - carodgers 13d ago
    "And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat." Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims. I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.
kylehotchkiss 13d ago
This narrative is gonna result in the feds installing electrical kill switches on datacenters. I wouldn’t take the business risk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My biggest fear with AI is that they’re going to hack into antiquated bank architecture and empty out accounts.
Applejack 13d ago
Isn't this just the big labs' latest move in the cycle to once again get regulation by their ignorant pals in the government(s) so that democratized open source models don't absolutely expose their over leveraging to secure and build compute and data centers. ...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs. Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?
jackb4040 13d ago
I applaud the clearly AI-pilled author for starting to pull themselves out of their echo chamber, but clearly some more work needs to be done. This statement is not true: > Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there! So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.
esafak 13d ago
The author is a journalism academic; he's not qualified to comment on AI risk.
thenthenthen 13d ago
The doom is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed
Byvrsakjo10 13d ago
I think their trying to make the public believe they're cautious individuals who intend on helping humanity advance, with their recent calls for a slow down on AI development. This way people will be more amenable and willing to use their LLMs, perhaps Dario and Altman do care for humanity and are definitely not trying to just make profit and I am reaching.

131 points by luk4 13d ago

ceeam 13d ago

"Here's our new AI" - "But does it run doom?"

jimmydoe 13d ago
we need a Doom-bench if it does not exist already (there are a few ones for RPG I think I saw)

cwnyth 13d ago

After fruit fly brain news, can you blame me for initially thinking this was about the video game?

Applejack 13d ago
Read it the exam same
broodbucket 13d ago
Given Doom is capitalised in the title but the rest of the title isn't in title case, not at all, it's a sensible way for your brain to read it.

rvz 13d ago

Or it is their entire IPO roadshow.

swingboy 13d ago

Can anyone from a lab anonymously confirm they have or are insanely close to real-time weight modifications and still using the same architecture every other lab is using (transformers)?

Betelbuddy 13d ago
>> real-time weight modifications You mean training? Yeah we call that training an LLM in my backyard...
- fooker 13d ago
  We don't really train deployed models in realtime in any realistic sense nowadays. It used to be a thing when ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets.
  - bigfishrunning 13d ago
    > ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets. It still is, it's just that there are a ton of buckets.
  - LogicFailsMe 13d ago
    May I introduce you to the word of our lord the arc-agi-3 kaggle competition? Because that's how they've hit 18% on a single RTX Pro 6000 with DIY RSI.
    - fooker 13d ago
      Where can I read more about this?
      - LogicFailsMe 13d ago
        https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2026-arc-agi-3 https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2026-arc-agi-3
- swingboy 13d ago
  You don’t know the difference between train and test time? I asked for somebody from a lab.
  - 13d ago

5eu5yu5u 13d ago

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deleted 13d ago

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fooker 13d ago

Reminder that they have been doing this schtick since GPT2. This is targeted towards governments and investors alike.

mercurywells 13d ago

How does that compare/contrast to the nuclear physicists speaking out during the early part of the 20th century?

applfanboysbgon 13d ago
The nuclear physicists were not banking on getting a trillion dollars invested in them by speaking out, for one. "Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
- pixl97 13d ago
  Um, guess you never heard of the Manhattan project.
  - applfanboysbgon 13d ago
    Perhaps you'd like to educate me? How many scientists from the Manhattan project were made into millionaires/billionaires owing to their ownership stake in it? When exactly did nuclear weapons go to market as a commercial product targeted at enterprises and consumers around the world?
simonwsimonwsim 13d ago
[dead]

AJ007 13d ago

Consider the messaging it took to attract AI researchers to OpenAI in the beginning, the exodus to Anthropic, and why Google, Meta, etc fail to recruit top researchers and the retain them. Reconcile all of this with the mammoth valuations of Anthropic and (previously non-profit) OpenAI and it all starts sounding a lot like "don't be evil." These guys never really believed any of this, did they? (not referring to the researchers)

ck2 13d ago

the short answer is what we are going to do about "AI" is exactly what we did about global warming absolutely nothing and just let it happen, the wealthy will be fine just don't look up they are even using the EXACT same excuses as global warming "well even if we do, China won't, so why bother"

b40d-48b2-979e 13d ago
Say heyooo to a 3°C El Niño...

NoahZuniga 13d ago

> I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense ... . As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world ... . My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype. Like if its true it can't be hype

phoghed 13d ago
Why not? Why can’t the believe their statements and also use them to generate hype? If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
zer00eyz 13d ago
> Like if its true it can't be hype https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perception-of-crime-exceeds-the-reality https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc... Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe". Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud... AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales. Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
reaperducer 13d ago
Like if its true it can't be hype I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat. If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-security-risks-anthropic.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...

francisofascii 13d ago

Similar to Y2K?

Suhinnall27 13d ago

[flagged]

apsec112 13d ago

All of the main characters here (Dario, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk) have been saying this for over ten years now, since before OpenAI or Anthropic even existed

ACCount39 13d ago
This. They've been saying "AI is an extremely powerful, extremely dangerous technology" back when actual AIs were image classifiers that would struggle to tell a cupcake apart from a dog. OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities. The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot. We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality. There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
- reducesuffering 13d ago
  Yep, anyone who thinks these leaders are only saying this now for marketing purposes hasn't even done a cursory 15 minute investigation into whether their beliefs are verifiably false.

mrinterweb 13d ago

The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time. Chinese labs are releasing open models that are nipping at the heals of the frontier models. Anthropic and OpenAI know these frontier class open weight models can threaten their valuations by changing inference to a commodity where the provider who can serve the best models the cheapest and fastest will win. Few are going to pay $50/million tokens when they could pay <$1/million tokens for similar outcomes. There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI, IMO.

palmotea 13d ago
> The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time....There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
- LogicFailsMe 13d ago
  Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
  - frabcus 13d ago
    I think either "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" meet your criteria? I guess not literally, due to the dates? But they have substantive technical details.
    - goatlover 13d ago
      Do the experts in the relevant fields agree with the "substantive" technical details on how the entire human race can be made extinct?

ianm218 13d ago

What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "doomers" argument. Like people get so caught in people acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking West Coast billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out. But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai 13d ago
Two things: 1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man. 2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it. One more thing: Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
- Gregkion 13d ago
  2. Astra just came out and Fable 5/5.1 too. These are SIGNIFICANT better in plenty of tasks than Opus in November. Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra. Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults. Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages. Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable. NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable. We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.

twodave 13d ago

Such a load of baloney. I don’t care what kind of controls you put in place, if ASI is ever achieved how do you think it will respond to being caged? The only option I can conceive of is to embrace it and hope it turns out to either be out of reach or benevolent towards its own creators. There is no putting the cork back in at this point.

meep_meep_meep 13d ago

I thought that too for a long time, but after the Hugging Face attack and given the proximity to Anthropic IPO, if this was hype then they are morons. This is guaranteed to cause massive backlash.

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thatmf 13d ago

The mea culpas are quite exhausting too. "Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"

ctoth 13d ago

> May 2023 — the founding text. We have been trying to warn you since far, far before May 2023.

schainks 13d ago

The cult-like behavior we're seeing from these "AI Leaders": 1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out! 2. Only one person can save you 3. IT ME Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable. This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.

shimman 13d ago
Yeah, this is how fascists talk and with seeing how this technology has done nothing to improve society (in fact all it seems to be doing is immiserating workers, enabling a surveillance society, and quite useful in helping target children at schools for drone strikes) it's not hard to be not only immediately skeptical but to resist it in the most extreme forms. This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
- schainks 13d ago
  Foregoing anesthesia before a root canal appears to have emboldened them.

agentultra 13d ago

I think we’re more likely to die of starvation from economic collapse, heat related stress, and complications from Long COVID than an algorithm waking up and destroying us. Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.

atleastoptimal 13d ago

This article reads like it was written by Claude. Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits. This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk

goatlover 13d ago
> they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
- frabcus 13d ago
  Yes, that's why the rest of society needs to make them pause.
phoghed 13d ago
The author specifically calls out that the analysis is done by perplexity
mlsu 13d ago
If you actually believe that your invention will lead to the extinction of humanity, you would be acting very very differently. Namely, you would not be inventing the thing that you think is going to kill all of humanity, and probably you would be doing everything in your power to prevent it from being invented, up to and including sabotage of the company that YOU work for, which is currently trying to invent that thing. And yet, here's Fable 6, more capable than ever before, oh BTW we are IPOing, oh, BTW, I have stock options...
- mrob 13d ago

drgo 13d ago

I wonder if this an indication that they’re worried about securing enough funding to keep developing models that need upgrading every few weeks.

vermarish 13d ago

> July-August 2026: the warning shot that was real I am so tired of reading unfiltered AI slop like this. What, as opposed to the fake warning shot mentioned nowhere in the article?

pizza234 13d ago

> and it concerns containment failure, reward hacking, and evaluation integrity, a governance and engineering problem, rather than machine malevolence. The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters: - "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants - "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking

apsec112 13d ago

The sources that this article cites have aged very badly and the author doesn't seem to have noticed this "But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article) "ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year

matherial 13d ago
The author appears to be an LLM. This seems to be a 100% AI-generated article, which makes the "as a media scholar" passage especially hilarious.
- raddan 13d ago
  If the author is an LLM, it’s a really bad one. > wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down. I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.
dwohnitmok 13d ago
Well it's because the article is AI-generated. Same with the Sacks tweet that was on the front page yesterday. There's a deep irony that all of these "anti-doom" pieces are entirely AI generated.

carodgers 13d ago

There's been substantial effort put into designing and running benchmarks for these models. You know which one they don't report any more? Chess ELO. Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess. Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.

Gregkion 13d ago
It doesn't really matter if it will be an LLM or Lecuns world model. Lecuns world model, if its the right architecture, will be retrained by google, anthropic and co with the massive amount of compute they have and the massive amount of data. Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other. And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master? We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people. Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
- deleted 13d ago
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- carodgers 13d ago
  "And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat." Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims. I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.

kylehotchkiss 13d ago

This narrative is gonna result in the feds installing electrical kill switches on datacenters. I wouldn’t take the business risk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My biggest fear with AI is that they’re going to hack into antiquated bank architecture and empty out accounts.

Applejack 13d ago

Isn't this just the big labs' latest move in the cycle to once again get regulation by their ignorant pals in the government(s) so that democratized open source models don't absolutely expose their over leveraging to secure and build compute and data centers. ...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs. Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?

jackb4040 13d ago

I applaud the clearly AI-pilled author for starting to pull themselves out of their echo chamber, but clearly some more work needs to be done. This statement is not true: > Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there! So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.

esafak 13d ago

The author is a journalism academic; he's not qualified to comment on AI risk.

thenthenthen 13d ago

The doom is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed

Byvrsakjo10 13d ago

I think their trying to make the public believe they're cautious individuals who intend on helping humanity advance, with their recent calls for a slow down on AI development. This way people will be more amenable and willing to use their LLMs, perhaps Dario and Altman do care for humanity and are definitely not trying to just make profit and I am reaching.