I agree with this. What's happening here is the idea of human extinction has been used to push this narrative that this is some sort of corporate PR stunt. This is demonstrably false. As somebody who has been in this field for much longer than these companies have even existed, in the case of Anthropic or OpenAI, these concerns go back decades.
It's commendable that the CEOs have acknowledged these risks at the same time. Maybe sometimes they exaggerate things in order to hype up their product or something, but I think that's basically what's going on. They are desperate because they see they are a few years away from building something they are scared of, and they want something to step in and defuse the race, if possible.
However, they don't believe that's possible, generally, and I think that's the mistake. We need to understand it is possible. That's why I mentioned the computer chips as a key point of intervention. If none of these companies and nobody globally can get access to these giant piles of chips and the energy to build these data centres, then we won't see this race continuing at anything like the current pace.
I will also add that I think the reason they are doing this is there's this element of “If we don't do it, somebody else will.” There's the desire to make tons of money. For some people, they also want to usher in this new species Max was talking about. They want to see humanity replaced by AI, which they view as the natural next step in evolution. There are many public comments to this effect from various people within the industry, and this is an incredibly antisocial attitude.