Doomerism Marketing is dangerous too!
Doomerism Marketing is dangerous too!
With the rise of ChatGPT's capabilities and the hype building on social media, its critics (read: "AI doomers") have become louder too.
For the discussion to stay balanced, between utopian AGI communism and total machine-fascist destruction, while before AI's bull run, I had seldomly heard of the AI alignment community leaders, although names like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Timnit Gebru always rang a bell, they usually didn't stay available too long in memory.
But, it must have been with OpenAI's improving marketing talent that those side characters started coming to our rescue, shielding us from imminent death and chaos - with arguments!
Figureheads of a domain that claims to confidently forecast the future of human progress, not through experimentation or data, but through conviction and being less wrong. And sure enough, the world decided to amplify their voices as to bring nuance to a currently unhinged techno optimism.
There is, however, an incredible value and power in controlling both sides of a story and even more, in having the audience "bear with you for just a moment."
That is, what I think, the secret sauce that make AI doomerism and OpenAI's marketing work so well together, and a strategy which I want to unveil today.
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Jason Calacanis is a smart dude, in case you had doubts. In a video uploaded 13 years ago to Youtube, and titled "Private tour of tesla model s," with a young Elon Musk giving details on the car, Jcal is supposedly behind the camera, vlogging the tour and asking an un-identified bystander if "they ordered one yet," with him re-affirming that "he got two."