Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.

Claiming your product increases the risk of extinction doesn't sound like something someone would do if it were just for fiduciary duty.

It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away

Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.

Read it as "please regulate us so we have a plausible explanation of why we're missing our growth/revenue projections by several orders of magnitude"

"Our product is so amazingly powerful that it just might result in the extinction of the human race."

A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.

The old "might end the human race" trick used by cynical promoters throughout history

If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" has been a meme for over a decade.

The intent of your comment is unclear to me, so I will ask you to clarify. And I will avoid any attempt at sarcasm from now on.

Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).

Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)

Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?

Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?

That anyone ever expected that it would?

I did read your comment correctly as a sarcastic way to make the point that, "no, potentially wiping out the human race is not a way to attract investors". I disagree.

I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.

And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.

I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.

If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.

So just Elon & Google, mainly?

If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?

Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?

In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms

If we treated people they eat based on those criteria we'd have to treat oil companies and all political parties that way too.

I have no idea how these extra words "they eat" ended up in my comment. It was autocorrect.

The politicians don't actively promise that what they are doing has a 10% chance of ending humanity, in fact, they claim the opposite.

Ok.

So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…

Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.

Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.

On what regulatory capture actually looks like: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

How about what all the other people who are not CEOs but are talking about this?

Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?

First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this? Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.

This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.

I think we should ask chatgpt

> and whoever is at Google

Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”

https://gist.github.com/vyp/8c7a58d2f9a521070283

This is gold. Thanks for sharing. Also Dario’s last name looks a lot like ‘a model’

it does if global extinction is the only debt management strategy left

Not all AI are chatbots, and more accurately the tools used here likely fall under the ML umbrella (as should LLMs in my opinion).

Yes, I am aware, but when I said "chatbot" I'm referring to LLM in general. I could have been more specific, but I was being pretty emotional as well.

You made some pretty serious claims to be waived off later as being pretty emotional though. I wasn't simply pointing it that chatbots == LLMs, your comment seemed to almost condemn the US specifically for the state of things as you see them today.

You can take it how you'd like. The reality is that the US bombed and killed children. There's no arguing that.

Would you hold that same line for individuals that built weapons, planes, bombs, etc in past wars?

Companies that make bombs aren't forced to (usually), and they also know there's only really one use for a bomb.

Jury trials definitely have their flaws, but what would you propose as a better approach?

Militaries are very rarely held to account for actions taken that end up causing civilian deaths. At the end if the day international law is extremely toothless, and trying to define laws for how war can be fought feels similar to watching the Patriot and wondering why the hell anyone agreed to stand in a line and take turns shooting at each other.

Do you expect any military to be held accountable legally and/or financially when they make a bad decision like this? It'd be great if they were, but I'd never expect it.

Absolutely; but that won't apply to any Western army.

Why western armies specifically? What countries have a history of actually holding their military to legal account for their actions?

Soviet army in the WWii.

How were they held accountable? Or are you referring to millions of soldiers they threw into the meat grinder or were shot BT their own officers?

There was actual law enforcement in the Soviet army. Hence, there was no genocide of the German people (which would be a completely justified and understandable action from any Soviet soldier's point of view). On the contrary, US military is absolutely free to violate any war rules.

Have you heard of Germany?

Germany would never be held accountable unless defeated by the USSR. And even so, it was still very limited responsibility.

Japan knew this one as well. Their future would have been much different if it was the USSR in charge of the pacific after the war finally ended.

The Chinese people future would be much different (the genocide would go on) if there wasn't USSR in charge in the region.

Yes, though if you are referring to the Nuremberg Trials its not a great example. A huge number of Germans were aware of, complicit in, or directly involved in genocide...the trials had 24 defendants.

I don't think that's the example you want. Left to their own devices the Germans would not have held themselves accountable. As we speak the most popular party in Germany is a holocaust revisionist party.

Military accountability, and government accountability in general, has been and will always be a problem. As long as those in charge make and enforce the rules they will always look out for themselves first.

For better or worse, health care providers at least in the US are for profit businesses. There's been plenty of arguments made to change that, but as it stands we shouldn't be surprised when a for profit business decides what service they provide and to whom they provide it.

Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised when someone who puts profits over other's lives gets ventillated by one of those lives in downtown New York. And what do you know, nobody was.

What so you mean by ventilated here?

Forgive my ignorance, I just don't get the reference and don't want to assume its anything front he pandemic response to United Healthcare.

United Healthcare CEO was assassinated because they implemented policies that denied Americans healthcare due to algorithmic discrimination.

I mean the person in question had new air vents rapidly installed in their body.

Is it generally considered gender affirming treatment when its affirming the gender aligned with their biological sex?

Technically that seems reasonable given the words "gender affirming" but I've only ever heard that term used for trans individuals rather than cis men taking testosterone.

Yes, I would say breast implants are gender affirming, or Musk's hair transplants. "I want to look more manly!"

The military leaders can't be tried in court for this either unless I'm mistaken. They have their own court system of sorts that would be used here and hold people to the standards of military code of conduct as this was an official act of duty.