Narrative collapse.

A common retort to someone talking about extinction risk is "only people which don't work on AI research or understand transformers are scared. people that work on LLMs know better than to fear matrix multiplication".

That's a really weird argument. That's like saying that we shouldn't be afraid of radiation because it's just decaying atoms

Just because a bit of harmless algebra is at the foundation of a technologie doesn’t make it so that all technology build with that is harmless too. There are many valid reasons to fear the impacts that LLM’s have on society

That's like saying don't be scared of layoffs because you know better than to fear the spreadsheet. The technology is generally not a reason to fear, or not fear, something.

Does Geoffrey Hinton work on AI research?

ehhh....to be pedantic, LLMs, like any NNs derive power from _not_ being pure matrix multiplication - they are "halved" matrix algebra, due to ReLU