If the companies win, we are all dead... in 5 years.

After observing this subreddit for several days, I am surprised that no one talks about the potentially imminent threat of general AI.

Here are 3 observations:

1- Leading AI companies (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Xai, and DeepSeek) have publicly stated goals to build an AI capable of automating 100% of human work.

They are so convinced they are on the right path that Mark Zuckerberg has offered salaries of 100 MILLION dollars per year to OpenAI engineers to leave Sam Altman and join his dedicated team instead.

2- Most AI researchers believe they will probably achieve such an AI within 2 to 10 years. For example, this is the opinion of Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner.

Even the most pessimistic about the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), like Yann LeCun, estimate it will happen within less than 20 years.

3- Finally, and most importantly, most AI security researchers believe there is a serious risk of human EXTINCTION if we actually manage to create an AI as capable as humans at all tasks.

According to the experts interviewed, the extinction risks generally range from 10% to 90%.

If you want to easily and clearly understand the stakes, I SRONGLY recommend this video: https://youtu.be/hAfPF-iCaWU

>>>Otherwise, I can give a very brief summary of the kinds of scenarios experts fear. <<<

It’s simple.

The risk here is that AI companies manage to create an AI capable of fully automating AI research.

Why?

Because once you have an AI capable of doing AI research, it can create the next generation of AI, more competent and more powerful than itself.

Once you have this second generation of AI, it will be able to create, in turn, the next generation even faster, as its self-improvement skills themselves will have been enhanced, and so on.

With this positive feedback loop (I think this term will resonate if you regularly discuss climate change), we can quickly end up with a kind of entity incredibly smarter and vastly more powerful than any human or group of humans on this planet.

... We have ABSOLUTELY NO guarantee of safety regarding what could happen with such an AI.

Are we really sure that creating a being thousands, millions, or even billions of times smarter than the smartest human is a good idea?

Will everything really go well?

Will we still have control?

Who will have control?

Etc.

This scenario is all the more worrying because companies irresponsibly neglect safety, and the public as well as politicians do not understand how dangerous the situation will be if the tech giants actually manage to trigger this intelligence explosion.