I can kind of understand it. After over a decade of spending time in the influence zone of Bostrom, Eliezer, and LW crowd[0], I find myself torn. Half of me is acutely aware of the danger potential of what we're discussing. The other half wants to play with chaining the current LLMs, text-to-$X and $X-to-text models, and domain-specific classical software in hopes of bootstrapping a proto-AGI, because
how cool it would be to pull it off.
Good my ADHD makes me write HN comments on LLM threads instead of working on the latter, because I'm not sure I could stop myself otherwise. But this also means I can very much imagine only thinking about the cool parts, and not considering the dangerous ones - because that's how I feel about 90% of the time when thinking about current SOTA models. It's just too damn exciting.
(Hell, it's the first thing in tech in the last decade, that I find exciting.)
--
[0] - Whatever one may think of them, I find it sadly ironic how Eliezer and his disciples were considered pseudo-scientific doomsday AI cultists a decade ago, back when the whole thing was only a far-future concern, how they're still considered pseudo-scientific doomsday AI cultists today, after AI field made a series of rapid jumps, landing us exactly in the scope of things they were harping about all that time - and how I bet they'll still be considered pseudo-scientific doomsday AI cultists after someone unleashes an unaligned AGI and ends us.