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Comment by dinobones | Hacker News Reader

My sci-fi fanfic theory: This is a time traveler or divine intervention event.

We have delayed the existence of AGI / Skynet by a few years.

Sam Altman's OpenAI was a local optimization for the ChatGPT use case. The more resources diverted towards that, the less chance of progress on real AGI. With that distraction out of the way, perhaps OpenAI can actually make progress on its charter.

The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI. So if AGI was delayed by such, there's a non-zero chance humanity fails to create AGI or survive in the new timeline.

Between the Earth's climate/environment being wrecked (we're well into some of the pessimistic projections for the 2050's) and SARS being allowed to run unchecked playing Russian Roulette with peoples' health (including literal brain damage), we're going to need a miracle.

> The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI.

Just imagine how much more efficient we could be in messing everything up if we had AGI, though!

Outside of AI x-risk, there's very little chance that any of these scenarii (short of an asteroid) would eradicate mankind. There's just so many of us, in so many places.

Even total nuclear war would, based on the Fermi estimates I've seen, not be able to do it.

We can agree that things are not all rosy, but picturing as "so bad we might all disappear" is a bit far-fetched.

Or someone on the board has a feverant/religious like belief about the risks of AGI and wants to delay it by basically destroying the company. Those with religious-like beliefs can appear to act irrationally to everyone else.

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