Agreed. I think one of the biggest questions on a lot of A.I. Safety people's minds now is whether Sam's optimism includes techno-optimism. In particular, people on twitter are speculating about whether Sam is, at heart, an e/acc, which is a new term that means Effective Accelerationism. Its use originally started as a semi-humorous dig at E.A. (Effective Altruism) but has started to pick up steam as a major philosophy in its own right.

The e/acc movement has adherents among OpenAI team members and backers, for example:

• Christian J. Gibson, engineer on the OpenAI Supercomputing team -- https://twitter.com/24kpep (e/acc) -- https://openai.com/blog/discovering-the-minutiae-of-backend-...

• Garry Tan 陈嘉兴, President & CEO of ycombinator -- https://twitter.com/garrytan (e/acc)

Some resources about what e/acc is:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ss6gomAJdqjwdSCy/what-s-the...

https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten...

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism....

https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/qHLiD9c6rWjbz3fR...

https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos

At a very high level, e/acc's are techno-utopians who believe that the benefits of accelerating technological progress outweigh the risks, and that there is in fact a moral obligation to accelerate tech as quickly as possible in order to maximize the amount of sentience in the universe.

A lot of people, myself included, are concerned that many e/acc's (including the movement's founder, that twitter account BasedBeffJezos), have indicated that they would be willing to accelerate humanity's extinction if this results in the creation of a sentient AI. Discussed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/181vd4w/comment/kaf...

    ''Really important to note that a lot of e/acc people consider it to be basically unimportant or even desirable if AI causes human extinction, that faction of them does not value human life. If you hear "next stage of intelligence", "bio bootloader", "machine god" said in an approving rather than horrified manner, that's probably what they believe. Some of them have even gone straight from "Yes, AGI is gonna happen and it's good that humans will be succeeded by a superior lifeform, because humans are bad" to "No, AGI can't happen, there's no need to engage in any sort of safety restrictions on AI whatsoever, everyone should have an AGI", apparently in an attempt to moderate their public views without changing the substance of what they're arguing for.''