Episode Details

The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time

Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.

I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky's ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn’t feel that real. And I didn’t do that much about it.

And then I got more involved with EA and AI Safety, and I read more and more, and I found myself feeling more convinced by the more measured, moderate approach to AI risk - AI is going to be transformative, but in a “it’ll destabilise the economy / mass job loss / mass surveillance“ kind of way, and I felt increasingly unimpressed by the OG Yudkowsky/MIRI worldview that we were doomed.

I was distinctly underwhelmed by If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and in the process of us making a video on it, I began to find it increasingly silly.

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Outline:

(00:09) The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time

(02:49) AI is real

(04:19) Progress really isn't slowing down

(04:47) The current models are not aligned by default

(06:17) The companies are really really bad

(07:38) Society is still mostly not waking up to any of this

(09:24) So where does that leave me?

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First published:
September 9th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aN7MS6zCtxBNhAznv/updates-from-the-swarm

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.