AI leaders publish desultory public statement addressing ‘risk of extinction’

As the artificial intelligence arms race continues to accelerate, so does the rush to signal concern about where it could lead.
The parallel trajectory of these two trends seems increasingly disingenuous, with the latter coming over as a crude attempt to sugar the potentially lethal pill represented by the former. We had Elon Musk, et al, calling for an implausible pause on AI development after Open AI announced GPT-4, followed by purposeful rustling of papers by US, UK and EU regulators and pol