I think if you just look at what people like e.g. Sam Altman are doing it's clear that they don't believe everything that they're saying regarding AI safety.

> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026

I feel like this is kind of a meaningless metric. Or at least, it's very difficult to measure. There's a spectrum of "let AI write the code" from "don't ever even look at the code produced" to "carefully review all the output and have AI iterate on it".

Also, it seems possible as time goes on people will _stop_ using AI to write code as much, or at least shift more to the right side of that spectrum, as we start to discover all kinds of problems caused by AI-authored code with little to no human oversight.

It helps with sales because they position it as “we can give you the power to end the world.” There’s plenty of people who want to wield that sort of power. It doesn’t have to be 4D chess. Maybe they are being genuine. But it is helping sales.

Does anyone have good estimates of what percent of real production code is currently being written by LLMs? (& presumably this is rather different for your typical SaaS backend vs. frontend vs. device drivers vs. kernel schedulers...)

it pushes the idea that these programs are super amazing and powerful to people who are non-technical. It also allows them to control the narrative of how exactly AI is dangerous to society. Rather than worry about the energy consumption of all these new datacenters, they can redirect attention to some far-off concern about SHODAN taking over Citadel Station and turning the inhabitants into cyber-mutants or whatever.

> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026

HN is the only place I have heard it seriously suggested that anything like this is happening or likely to happen. We certainly get a lot of cheerleading here, my guess is that in the trenches the fraction is way lower.

> Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology.

It makes more sense if one breaks that "everyone" into subgroups. A good first-pass split would be "investors" versus "everyone else."

From their perspective: Rich Investor Alice rushing over with bags of money because of FOMO >>> Random Person Bob suffers anxiety reading the news.

One can hone it a bit more by thinking about how it helps them gain access to politicians, media that's always willing to spread their quotes, and even just getting CEO Carol's name out there.

When your statements directly influence millions of dollars in revenue, its always 4D chess. If Sam altman beleives half the stuff he's peddling, I'd be very shocked.

> It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying

It seems more reasonable to me to think that they know it's bullshit and it's just marketing. Not necessarily marketing to end users as much as investors. It's very hard to take "AGI in 3 years" seriously.

I'd argue if they really believed AI was an existential threat, they would shut down research and encourage everyone else to halt R&D. But then again, the Cold War happened, even over the objections of physicists like Einstein & Oppenheimer.

I'm fairly certain it's both. They aren't going to be making a lot of money until they release it so they might as well get something (marketing) out of it, as well as spread more awareness so those paying attention can start preparing for what's to come. We'll see how effective it is with all their hashed patches or whatever.

They explained in detail why they felt they had to talk about it. They think there's no safe deployment strategy other than fixing all the vulnerabilities it's likely to find, and there are too many such vulnerabilities for them to fix without getting help from a substantial number of trusted partners.