Yes, the doom crowd thinking comes directly from the Rationalist community, which takes a very religious view of AGI and intelligence. That sort of merged with the Effective Altruism crowd, resulting in that whole idea that we have to reach AGI as fast as possible and contribute literally all our resources to it, because it’s the only rational way to save as much suffering and lives as possible. Sounds incredibly stupid but it’s how AI leaders justify working on something they believe will be a machine god that might doom humanity.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are from that world, where Rationalist doesn’t mean you’re a rational human being, but instead that it is rational to believe that AGI will be created, thus that they should be the ones creating it. It’s a doomsday cult.

If you start looking at the links between prominent rationalists and effective altruists you see how that whole doom prophecy came about. It’s also how they got so much capital in the early days, SBF literally invested into Anthropic as part of his Effective Altruism effort foundation, and both Amodei siblings are deeply into that whole world