The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Are the AI industry’s apocalyptic warnings just a marketing ploy?

When tech CEOs say their products might kill us all, are they trying to sell us something?

Silicon Valley has long warned that its favorite technology might get us all killed. But chatter about AI’s apocalyptic potential has grown louder in recent weeks.

In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, accusing his former employer of “gambling with our lives” by developing evermore powerful models faster than it could control them. One of Coxon’s former colleagues vouched for this assessment, saying that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade.

Recent pronouncements from the leaders of these companies have been nearly as grim. At the United Nations last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that, if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman similarly declared that our species just might “lose control of the future” to the type of software that his firm is selling.

All this triggered a tsunami of media coverage and policy debate about the “existential risks” of AI — and what, if anything, we can do about them.

Some critics argue that AI leaders’ warnings about existential risk are a PR strategy to attract investment, distract from present-day harms, and shape regulation in their favor.

But this theory doesn’t make a ton of sense.

The simpler explanation is that many AI executives, researchers, and defectors genuinely believe the technology poses catastrophic risks, based on real trends in AI’s growing power and autonomy.

Yet some of the AI industry’s biggest critics are more annoyed than afraid. As they see it, the world isn’t trembling on the precipice of robo-annihilation, so much as falling for the tricks of snake oil salesmen. This argument has been percolating for years, voiced by a broad set of observers, including the linguist Emily Bender (“It makes the product seem more powerful”), computer scientist Timnit Gebru (“It’s not just a distraction, but it’s harmful”), as well as Substack columnist Ed Zitron and various reporters and social media influencers.

In their thinking, Altman and Amodei aren’t talking up their technology’s catastrophic potential because they’re rationally afraid of where AI is going — they’re doing so because their firms are ravenously hungry for more investment. And the reason why “AI doom” has grown more salient in recent weeks isn’t that the case for concern has gotten stronger, but rather that OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs have gotten closer.

In short, these Big Tech skeptics argue, journalists and politicians have fallen prey to a counterintuitive PR strategy, one that stokes media frenzies over ludicrous sci-fi scenarios in order to hype AI’s technological promise, distract attention from chatbots’ present-day harms, and help labs secure favorable regulatory treatment.

This would be reassuring, if true. Unfortunately, the theory is unpersuasive. There is little reason to believe that the panic over AI’s “existential risks” was cooked up in a Silicon Valley marketing department. To the contrary, the most plausible explanation for the AI sector’s doomsaying is also the most straightforward: Many of the industry’s executives, employees, and analysts genuinely believe that AI progress poses catastrophic risks.

In my conversations with close observers of the industry, even some of OpenAI and Anthropic’s fiercest detractors conceded that their leaders’ avowed concerns are unlikely to be mere marketing tactics. “The more I learn about the underlying ideologies out of which those two labs were formed, the more I think what we have here is a sincere belief,” the author and computer scientist Cal Newport told me.

This does not mean that Amodei and Altman are right, much less that we can trust in their judgment or integrity. There are many reasons to doubt that the weather forecast for 2036 is “cloudy with a chance of robot apocalypse,” or that anyone can assign a “10 percent” probability to the latter outcome without pulling numbers out of thin air.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley’s Cassandras have some logic and evidence on their side. AI models are growing both more capable, autonomous, and arguably unruly. If these trends continue unchecked, it’s not hard to see how they could yield very bad outcomes.

Given the stakes, we should not be comfortable........

© Vox