That's correct. I refer to experts in the field. I'm more of a generalist interested in the intersection between government and technology. Experts working in state-of-the-art AI laboratories developing those systems say they don't know how to control them and it scares them. The only reason they're accelerating development is they hope someone else will be able to control those systems if they can't, that those people might have a better chance of doing so. Such a race makes no sense.
The consequences of the current systems are significant, but not jarring. It's not the end of the world. An issue with ChatGPT could lead to a teenager losing their life or a cyber-attack, but we could get over that. However, if AI reaches a point where it can understand what we do better than us, act more quickly than us and thwart our plans, we'll be vulnerable to its decisions and our security forces won't be able to defend us.