Researchers aren't immune to the incentives the rest of the field has. They're every bit as financially incentivized to push the AI risk narrative as the rest of the industry.
Geoff Hinton /left his job/ at Google because he sees the risks as real, so I think that's a tough case to make.
Their message is being amplified and distorted by forces that are. That they're both comfortably wealthy from creating the problems they now preach solutions to is also no small matter.
He did not leave his job when the bias and harm of the existing I models at Google were doing.
He did not quit his job when Google fired their AI ethics champion rather than change their behaviour
Has he had anything to say about the harm Google's algorithms do?
If it were a perfect society and people discovered deep neural networks, there would be no excuse to blame bad actors for posing the question of whether AGI is an existential problem or not, and what to do about it. Unlike bad groups of people, the question won't go away. In the real world, it is entirely possible to have to consider multiple issues at once, not at the expense of any issue.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for why researchers are saying there is a danger is that they genuinely believe it.
The incentive here is that they want to live, and they want their loved ones to live.