Ethan Mollick: claiming AI firms hype existential risks to pump stocks doesn't hold up
eldonredwards · x · 2026-10-28
Ethan Mollick pushed back on the recurring argument that AI companies discuss existential risks to generate hype and inflate stock prices: telling people your product might kill everyone does not, in fact, drive adoption or reduce regulatory risk.
The quoted comment also criticizes a CJR piece: calling frontier AI systems "autocomplete machines" is false and misleading given AI systems routinely develop novel solutions to decades-old mathematical problems; and the claim that anthropomorphizing AI removes accountability is unsupported — Anthropic's own system cards acknowledge and account for the systems' many flaws.
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