I see this kind of opinion being expressed on HN quite a lot, and while I understand why people might cynically reach that conclusion, I actually find the simpler answer here more persuasive: the CEOs are being genuinely cautious.

If you look at the AI space, most of the big players (as in the individual researchers and engineers) are getting worried. The ideas that circulate on LessWrong have become more and more influential and in vogue in Silicon Valley, and people are scared. You should listen to Jacob Coxon’s interview with the New York Times. He describes how working on this kind of AI research had induced a sort of insanity in a lot of his past friends and coworkers as they begin to grapple with the implications of what they’re creating.

Sometimes, HN can be a little too skeptical and anti-corporate for its own good. I personally believe that concerns around AI risks are well-founded, anywhere on the spectrum from mass labor displacement to actual harm to humanity. I rarely see people here actually wrestle with those ideas, instead defaulting to dismissing LLMs as too stupid because Claude wasn’t able to write as elegant of a compiler as them. AI has clearly improved radically in the past few years, and it’s worth extrapolating that into the future and taking a good hard look at what that means for humanity.