as a sidenote, one reason I really like Leo is because he maintains a kind of "pragmatic cautious optimism" around AI. he thinks it's a civilizationally important project and a matter of urgent national security. he thinks AGI and maybe ASI is possible, but he isn't a doomer. in fact, he's helping bring this future about (more on this later). most "AI futurists" in silicon valley are doomers, unfortunately. they unhelpfully think AI is going to literally kill us all. I'm not going to try to "debunk" the doomer mentality here but I think it's far fetched and more of a spiritual/metaphysical position than an empirical one. (secular doomsday cults are the main thrust of religion-without-religion these days, whether climate or now AI.) the doomers also don't really have good suggestions for dealing with the apocalypse they foresee. they just want us to collectively stop building AI, or something. this isn't a very practical suggestion but they are very good at making noise, so they get disproportionate attention. there's a very big market for prophecies of doom and these people take advantage of that. the second camp is the skeptics mainly found on the left that intone things like "AI is just a stochastic parrot" camp which we can trivially dismiss since they are just obviously wrong. these people tend to think all tech and markets are bad and wrong and think AI is a bubble. not much to say here, they are just wrong. the other major camp is the e/accs that are kind of the inverse of the doomers; they want to push forward AI no matter what as a kind of political statement. they tend to be a little cavalier with regards to genuine AI safety risks and seem more motivated by owning the libs. the last camp is simply the people building AI that have a strong economic incentive to downplay the risks. Leo isn't in this camp either. he's sanguine about the risks and the fact that this technology deserves a sort of manhattan project of its own. our ability to deal with it IS existential and he acknowledges that. daniel reeves describes Leo's philosophy as "AGI realism" and it's the same camp that I subscribe to (even after reading every piece of doomer literature ever written).
