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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates is too busy trying to save his reputation from his Epstein association to be believed, he's a billionaire concern troll and Amodei is far more worried about his stock price than he is about humanity. Those two are discounted. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem, but they are just hitching their wagons to horse that happens to be running in a direction that is temporarily useful to them.

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That's plausible, although I don't think it's actually correct. But there's a pretty extensive set of AI luminaries who are concerned who can't be dismissed so easily.

There are as many 'luminaries' on LeCun's side as there are on Hinton's. Andrew Ng, Pedro Domingos, Schmidhuber, and the list goes on.

Any time it seems to you that there are more people on the side of an issue that you happen to be on yourself, a good rule of thumb is to assume confirmation bias.

Spreading fear of an awesome power whose true danger is unproven is Religion 101.

Also scamming 101 for that matter, you want your mark to feel an immediate threat of overwhelmingly negative consequences so they'll buy whatever you're selling to prevent it. Silicon Valley directly makes tens of billions of USD literally serving scams to the public already, so I think it's fair to take most claims of doom with a pinch of salt.

It's also probably the correct approach to take with an awesome power whose true danger is unproven.

It's very disappointing to hear BS like this coming from a very intelligent crowd such as HN. How many people in the US do you think know who Epstein was, let alone what is contained in his file? How many in the world? If Bill Gates is worried about his reputation, Microsoft has sealed the deal long time ago.

As for Dario, of course he's worried about the stock price. I would if I were in his shoes. That's literally part of a CEO's job. He is also one who has consistently raised the issue with AI safety. He was OpenAI's head of AI safety after all. Anthropic is considered security risk by the US. Is that "temporary useful"?

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