AI might ‘kill us all.’ That’s still a savvy sales pitch

At the time, artificial intelligence anxieties were running high.

The latest frontier model, with apparent human-level faculties, had gone rogue – displaying dangerous, even devious online behaviors.

Leading AI researchers and executives warned of the “profound risks to society and humanity” that could radically alter “the history of life on Earth.” Absent any government regulation and amidst an “out-of-control” corporate rush into the unknown, they called for an immediate moratorium on developing more powerful AI systems.

This was, of course, three-and-half years ago .

Perhaps more relevant, these concerns arrived hundreds of billions of investment dollars prior to the latest AI-extinction panic.

Last month, Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher whose resignation post went viral and made headlines, issued pleas not unlike those of the “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others in March 2023.

Coxon admonished the wild-eyed pursuit of superintelligence that’s “gambling with our lives.” “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote on X.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

This is not a marketing stunt.” And, yet, the two are not mutually exclusive: The risks can be real, as can the rewards that come with a trillion-dollar I.P.O., which both OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing.

It can be both alarmist and advertising.

After all, the most valuable companies in history surely need to be selling the most powerful technologies in history.

What else would all that capital be paying for? And what could be more powerful than an extinction-level technology? If AI can wipe out civilization, it can surely handle some work emails on your behalf.

As it’s spread relentlessly in the years since that open letter, artificial intelligence has been called many things: “an idea, an infrastructure, an industry.” But because it’s a giant market wager on life in the future, it must also be a massive, ongoing sales pitch.

That sales pitch has only grown more frenzied as the economics of AI have gotten more precarious.