It amazes me how pieces like this never stop to question whether these beliefs are genuine.
If I'm one of these researchers who's leaving their position, "I am so smart that I can make something world endingly dangerous, but also so principled that I'm willing to walk away from it" is a pretty slick bit of self promotion.
Even if I was making a career change for unrelated reasons, that's absolutely the story I'd be telling.
A common retort to someone talking about extinction risk is "only people which don't work on AI research or understand transformers are scared. people that work on LLMs know better than to fear matrix multiplication".
That's like saying don't be scared of layoffs because you know better than to fear the spreadsheet. The technology is generally not a reason to fear, or not fear, something.
If I'm one of these researchers who's leaving their position, "I am so smart that I can make something world endingly dangerous, but also so principled that I'm willing to walk away from it" is a pretty slick bit of self promotion.
Even if I was making a career change for unrelated reasons, that's absolutely the story I'd be telling.
A common retort to someone talking about extinction risk is "only people which don't work on AI research or understand transformers are scared. people that work on LLMs know better than to fear matrix multiplication".