Please, elaborate. I'm actually very curious about the dangers of a text model that were non-existent beforehand.
> How likely is it that we'll have two sapient species on earth
We already do. There are multiple animals (crows, monkeys, etc.) that qualify for not just sentience but sapience. It's... really not that different to subjugating other animal species. Except in the case of AI, it's sapience is obviously nonhuman and it's capabilities are only what we ascribe to it.
> The unaligned ones, the ones that can do dangerous things, things we don't want them to do, are smarter!
No. This is a gross misinterpretation of the situation, I think.
Our current benchmark for "smartness" is how few questions these models refuse to answer. You are comparing "unaligned" models to aligned ones, and what you're really talking about is a safety filter that adversely affects the number of answers it can respond to. That does not inherently make it smarter by de-facto, just less selective. You could be comparing unfiltered Vicuna to GPT-4 and be completely wrong in this situation.
> do you think it is possible to create machine-based intelligence
I don't know. Sure. We have little black boxes to spit out text, that's enough for "intelligence" by most standards. It's a very nonscary and almost endearing form of intelligence, but I'd argue we're either already there or never reaching it. I need a better definition of intelligence.
> how hard do you think it is to ensure that creating a new form of superior intelligence will not, at some point down the line, go very badly for humans?
How hard is it to ensure kids aged 3-11 don't choke on Stay-Puft marshmallows?
I also don't know. I do know that it is mostly harmless though, and unless you deliberately try to weaponize it to prove a point that it won't really be that threatening. Current state-of-the-art AI does not really scare me. Even on it's current trajectory, I don't see AI's impact on the planet being that much different from the status quo in a decade.
All this hype is awfully reminiscent of cryptocurrency advocates insisting the world would change once digital currency became popular. And they were right! The world did change, slightly, and now everyone hates cryptocurrency and uses our financial systems to suppress it's usage. If AI becomes a tangible, real threat like that, society will respond in shockingly minor ways to accommodate.