this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
76 points (90.4% liked)
TechTakes
2776 readers
216 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is it just me or does this "AI Doomsday" talk seem like coordinated messaging?
Chatbots that are smart enough to destroy humanity would be really impressive, right? "Powerful enough to change the world" and "powerful enough to destroy the world" are similar claims and maybe they're switching to the second one because nobody is buying the first anymore.
it's not just you
occam's razor says that in the face of faltering demand and sky-high expenditures, government cheese and regulation is an expected pivot
try to suggest that and the rats get very mad tho
Hey it worked for cryptocurrencies.
They want to shift responsibilities to their products and their users.
@yesman @supersquirrel this has been one of the core critihype topics all along. It just gets more or less emphasis over time and I think they're intentionally cycling through them.
This was all established in the "Effective Altruist" scene that's at the root of this stuff well before they latched onto LLMs as the fake AI technology to use for the scam.
I cant tell if you are being serious or not but in case you are, and truly dont remember this gem from almost 12 years ago.
Also, an actual article from Yahoo! on the letter that definitely doesnt sound like it was written by fangirl, lol
@yesman @supersquirrel its an op. Just another promo.
The big organisations want it regulated to the point where upstarts get strangled by oversight and regulations and only the biggest established players will have the manpower and money to ensure compliance.
OpenAI and Anthropic wants to stop training new models because they have run out of other people's money.
They want regulators to ban their competition because without spending untold money to stay like 4 months ahead of competitors, they are not viable businesses.
@cstross @supersquirrel @yesman But who's buying the latter? Those already willing and able to destroy are already stoking the AI money furnace. What do the rest of us get out of consenting to stoke it, too, against our own best interest?
@Yolfen @supersquirrel @yesman It's aimed at the press and politicians. LLM model progress is visibly stalling so the next step is for OpenAI and Anthropic to go "Booga-booga-AI DOOM" and push for a regulatory environment that freezes out small upstart competitors/Chinese AI firms/self-hosted models. It's all about creating and exploiting a rental monopoly.
The emerging talk about "AI Chornobyl" is quite disturbing with regards to what this booga-booga gonna look like. If they don't get enough booga booga from this stupid hacking incident, then what?
What's really disturbing to me is that now they are talking about the power grid as a target. It's not like their usual biblical stuff about plagues and locusts. Of course, power grid can't be that insecure, or Iran would've went for it already, but they have privileged access courtesy of all the use of chatbots to run shell commands etc.
Gotta get that investment cash somehow, why not skynet?
@yesman
I think it's fairly likely that we will see a very large scale calamity due to misuse of AI, such as a nation's power grid going down for days. Something that causes multiple attributable deaths. I think that AI companies know this and so are begging for gov regulation with doom talk, because they know that (a) no government is actually capable of that right now; (b) it pumps the stock; (c) when the biggie hits they will be able to say they asked for regulation that didn't come.
@yesman @supersquirrel well, for one, didn't ai almost cause an attack on some chinese ship the other day?
I think they are always a mix of exaggeration and truth in these things
Almost did. But that wasn’t “the AI is secretly super smart!!!” it was “the AI hallucinated some bullshit and people nearly forgot to actually fact check it”
@lurker i don't think power is related to intelligence. Well, actually, yes, but only to get gain our trust. But regardless how AI progress, I do think they are partially honest I remember listening to some interview of a former employee of Anthtropic a week ago who say everyone is afraid. Plus, if you work in AI company, you are going to be biased for AI progress + be part of the echo chamber
Yeah they’re all “honest”, except they’re all living in the rationalist/doomsday echo chamber that massively warps their perspective
@lurker but to be fair, AI company ethics have also been a lot of doublespeak