Okay, so all of these instances of AI supposedly "escaping containment" were orchestrated by a gaggle of effective altruists, who hired a gaggle of effective altruists, to make the public freak out about AI.
Occam's Razor never leads us astray, does it.
Irregular is not an "effective altruist" firm, it's just another shitty cybersecurity firm, and this article is written by someone with a clear bias against "effective altruists" while not even understanding the term.
Literally all EA is, is using reasoning to decide where to best spend your money/time. If you have ever asked yourself "how can I best reduce suffering with my marginal dollar or hour?" - congratulations, you're an "effective altruist" and both the author of the article as well as the Trump administration find you untrustworthy.
There's a gaping chasm between Effective Altruism the principle, and Effective Altruism as practiced by self-proclaimed Effective Altruists.
Your usage of the term is based on the principle as originally defined. Mine is based on the people who claim the label of EA, and how they go about practicing those principles.
I think you're right about EA in principle. In practice, it's reheated Third Way Clintonism with a sprinkle of AI apocalypse conspiracy.
There really isn't. All sorts of people call themselves EA.
For some self proclaimed EA, the development of superintelligence is indeed potentially apocalyptic, so they devote their money/time to making it arrive safely. This is basically every well-respected researcher at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc.
For other self proclaimed EA, that is all is very unlikely, and so they devote their time to reducing the prevalence of factory farming and animal suffering, as they see it as the largest source of suffering-hours on the planet.
For yet other EAs, it is simply about donating your money to the places that save the most lives per dollar, as best as we can measure it - and better measuring it where we can't.
Painting all EA with one brush - and one so dismissive of reasonable concerns, like "superintelligence could be dangerous" as "apocalypse conspiracy" - seems very strange to me, but you do you.
Its so manipulative for IPO reasons too. The fact is that all of these systems are still just stastically predicting the next token. Spending trillions on data centers and more training data hasnt changed the fundamental reality that it is still just predicting the next token.
That is not worth the investments being made.