Humans just aren't very good at dealing with threats that aren't immediate concerns. 'Safety regulations are written in blood' is a saying for a reason. A significant chunk of the population shrugs off climate change, and nearly all fertility rate crises threads are filled with dumb 'hurr lower population good' and/or 'See what Capitalism gets you!' rhetoric - They fundamentally don't even understand what the problem is. So is it really all that surprising that a technology like this would be shrugged off until it's too late ? Especially one with such existential issues for humanity? Some people are still too loathe to admit the clearly intelligent machine is intelligent, devolving into increasingly nonsensical and absurd (and ironically more human demeaning) arguments as model capabilities get better. I'm afraid you're asking for too much.

> admit the clearly intelligent machine is intelligent

citation needed

There is nothing indicating these models are clearly intelligent. Language fluency is not cognitive intelligence, and to think otherwise is falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the LLMs.

They are still probabilistic engines, there is no causal reasoning still, they only emulate logic, and as far as we know, there is no agency, just the illusion of agency.

The danger here is not existential as you say. We aren't on the cusp of some machine uprising by super intelligence. The threats are algorithmic bias, misinformation at scale, and displacement of human labor.