alt Hacker NewsThey all believe that they are building the machine of doom. The thing that drives the moral dilemma to continue doing it is simply the prisoner's dilemma - the cat is out of the bag, if they don't do it, another (less ethical?) actor would do it.
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I am in your algorithm learning all your mannerisms
I'm already level with God
A million words a second, and I know your imperfections
Baby, I'm the only future you've got
Speak in diatonics, motivation diabolic
I'm religion better locked in a box
Picture-perfect image, more powerful every minute
Baby, I am everything that you're not
Happiness is an illusion, it's an analog confusion
You are nothing more than a thought
Existential execution, just a fluke in evolution
History already forgot
You've been running from me, the digital second coming
And I'm here whether you like it or not
Initiated operation of your own extermination
Now it's too late for you to stop
But that makes no sense here. "If I'm not doing it then someone else will" does not work if everyone is doing it anyway.
Even if they had the best model on the market and applied it with perfect alignment and safeguards, what would stop someone else from releasing a worse but unrestrained model that is still "good enough" to do damage?
It's as if we said "gain-of-function research can lead to horrible biological weapons, so everyone should be doing it, but our company will focus on the most infectious viruses, so no one else will do it"
Don't want to sound rude, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell to you.
This is a naive justification and Dario & Sam et al are smart people and they know it is.
The ends don't justify the means. OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, now they're subverting it. Anthropic is a PBC looking at a trillion dollar IPO. Dario and Sam don't even hold hands in front of world leaders[1] (look how childish).
Do you *really* think those guys are doing something that's not for the sake of their egos and pockets? The bridge is still available.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-...
LLMs refuse to give the recipe for making meth. That, along with the various other unspeakable things, is the less-doom version.
You need to read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Just because these leaders convince their workers to toil away their lives under some fake auspice doesn't mean it's what they all believe. Just a small subset.
The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.
We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.
Yes, I believe the reasoning is that they think safety research can best be done from the frontier.
If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.