Doomer's advisor joins Musk's xAI, the 4th cutting-edge research lab focused on apocalypse AI

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Elon Musk has tapped Dan Hendrycks, a machine learning researcher who serves as director of the nonprofit Center for AI Security, as an advisor to his new startup, xAI.

Hendrycks, whose organization sponsored an AI risk statement in May that was signed by the CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and hundreds of other AI experts, receives more than 90% of its funding from Open Philanthropy, a nonprofit led by a prominent couple (Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna) in the controversial Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as "an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as much as possible". According to many EA adherents, the overriding concern facing humanity is to avoid a doomsday scenario where a man-made AGI eradicates our species.

Musk's nomination of Hendrycks is significant because it's the clearest sign yet that four of the world's most celebrated and best-funded AI research labs — OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and now xAI — are bringing these kinds of ideas of existential risk, or x-risk, on AI systems to the mainstream.

That's the case even though many top AI researchers and computer scientists disagree that this "catastrophic" narrative deserves so much attention.

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For example, Sara Hooker, Cohere's head of AI, told VentureBeat in May that x-risk "is a fringe topic." And Mark Riedl, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that existential threats are “often reported as fact,” which he added “goes a long way to normalizing, through repetition, the belief that only scenarios that endanger civilization as a whole matter and that further harm does not occur or have consequence.”

Kyunghyun Cho, NYU AI researcher and professor, agrees, telling VentureBeat in June that he thinks these "catastrophic stories" distract from the real problems, both positive and negative, posed by today's AI.

"I'm disappointed with a lot of this discussion about existential risk; now they even call it 'extinction' in the literal sense," he said. "It sucks the air out of the room."

Other AI experts have also pointed out, both publicly and privately, that they are concerned about the companies' publicly acknowledged ties to the EA community, which supports...