I mean, I think it's scarier that once these models get smart enough, they will be able to act in the world in the same way that a shell script can execute on your machine. A model that can read code and find and exploit security flaws to build a botnet, or even sign up for a bank account using a fake identity, invest in stocks, make money, and purchase servers to train copies of its own mis-aligned AI, or fork copies of itself and give them instructions... That's what keeps me up at night. They aren't smart enough to do long-term planning and reasoning yet, but it's a problem we absolutely need to solve before they can.

Imagine what a world-class programmer could accomplish in this world if they thought 100 times faster than a human, and had no fear of going to jail. Our world is an insecure machine, and we're preparing to run untrusted code with root access.

And sure, maybe we can try to use less-intelligent AIs to secure things before then, but the weak point is still humans. Social engineering is typically way easier than straight up hacking. We've seen these lesser AIs threaten people, and while we can keep bonking them on the nose when they do that, we can't prove or tell that they won't ever do it in a different situation, when they judge that it's likely to be the most effective course of action.

I hope every day that this is all just hype and that another AI winter is coming, because we need time (who knows how long) for a way to align these things. But I really fear that it isn't.