I think that the genAI companies themselves present a greater danger to us (arguably not an existential danger, though) than genAI itself.

On the other side, the current administration also has powerful backers whose businesses are complemented by AI and would benefit from it becoming a commodity. Think about who Vance is speaking on behalf of.

So the AI companies need to use fear to drive public demand for their regulation efforts. IMO there's little to no honest discourse and a lot of attempts to manipulate public opinion for objectives that we have little stake in. I personally don't trust any of the involved parties to make decisions for the public good.

If they were the moral people they say they are, and believed what they say about it killing humanity they would stop unilaterally. These are the “rationalists” but they act like the fundamentalist church I grew up in. Every fact serves the same conclusion.

Sure AI sucks, but not to that degree (yet)

If you haven't looked at the stuff that has come out in the past couple of months (like the Huggingface hack and the Navier-Stokes solution) and/or you're dismissing it as marketing, you're grossly misunderstanding the current state of what's possible, what the potential of the frontier models deployed at scale is. Personally I'm finding it fascinating to follow, and I'm much more excited about the upsides than thinking about the risks but the risks are very real.

That said, there are plausible scenarios where AI can cause great harm, even if it doesn't extend to "eliminating all humanity". So I don't reject calls for putting more emphasis on AI safety and alignment out of hand. On the other hand, I don't support the idea of implementing a new "Turing Registry"[1] like government agency. I also don't think most of the various proposals out there for regulating AI are enforceable in the slightest.

So where does that leave me? Uncertain. I wish I could take a more concrete stance, but from my perspective, the data needed to do that just isn't there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer