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The best explanation of the C-suite AI safety concerns is that the frontier AI companies are not making enough money to justify their capex, so they are looking for a way to slow down, especially as rates climb even higher and political sentiment against data centers raises the cost of data centers (quite justifiably, imo). Money is also the reason for Trump's opposition: the data center buildout is the main thing propping up US GDP and stock market, which would otherwise be providing withering reviews of his trade/war policies.
That explanation is certainly popular on Reddit. It combines cynicism and a dislike of big corporations, and it demonstrates the poster's intelligence. Other variations include that the frontier companies are worried about open source models threatening their business model or that they are juicing the numbers for an upcoming IPO. If you want to get really spicy, you might claim that Hugging Face was a publicity stunt and was deliberately set up.
But is it really the best explanation? I would say the best explanation is that the people who know most about AI are genuinely worried about it. They have been talking about the risks for years, after all. They've read about the Hugging Face incident and the similar cyber attacks from Anthropic. They understand the race dynamics involved, both between frontier companies and between the US and China. They've read AI 2027. And above all, they've seen what the internal, unreleased models can do and know how they are training the next generation to be even more powerful.
Whether or not it's clearly the best, it's the one that most closely follows the money. I don't think the US frontier companies have any illusions that Chinese companies would match their deceleration, which is another potential finance-driven explanation.
But surely if the Chinese companies aren't going to pace the frontier, then the US frontier companies have even less incentive to slow down (or in this case, to lobby the government to force them to slow down)? If the US government forces them to slow down, then their Chinese competitors will find it easier to overtake them. The fact that they are lobbying for a slowdown in spite of this suggests that their stated concerns about alignment are real.
I mentioned the China-driven explanation only to preemptively reject it, so the idea that Chinese companies would not push the frontier doesnt really move the needle for me. To me, it starts and stop with unsustainable capex, and I think that they would in fact be correct to decelerate for this reason. The HF stuff, besides being a safety concern, is just as importantly an indication that they are not totally capable of turning the current frontier into economically valuable output.
What would it take to convince you their concerns about safety are real?
Have the proposed means of addressing safety not be something that seems to obviously create financial/strategic benefits for them. They need to figure out a costly signal.
There is very obviously not a single thing that could ever satisfy you people. You're twisting literally calling their own sole product a risk to kill all humans in a marketing gimmick to secure regulatory capture. If they carved "No really we're serious about the risks" into their chests and then hung themselves you'd claim they were expecting to receive compensation in the afterlife.
No, I am saying they are using it as cover to slow down unsustainable capex.
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