Who should we believe? People who say AI scaling makes it a more dangerous threat than thousands of nuclear warheads? Or the ones who, whenever a new model comes out say "AI has already peaked. Not any better than Opus 4"?

Both parties are convinced that their take is so blatantly obvious as to not require justification. It feels like the only thing these kinds of takes justify is the point-of-view that nobody knows how this is going to play out.

As a technologist, I can use my imagination. There are incentives in both directions, but I am less afraid of being overly cautious and preparing for the potential harms.

Based on publicly available evidence, we should believe the former because AI models have made continuous advances that have been measured. The idea that the continuous advances will stop currently has no evidential support. I'm not saying it's not a possibility, just that it seems unsupported conjecture right now.

By the way, there seems to be a new form of AI skepticism emerging in the US that comes from general opposition to data centers, and in my experience the AI skeptic part of it is wholly irrational. I've met people online who suggested, without providing any evidence, that AI is useless and nobody wants it. That's a very implausible take.