Those aren't the same are they?

It’s clear what a big bomb could do, but these “whistleblowers” are not showing anything.

They’re like “imagine…”, no show me internal documents or training data or something other than trust me bro.

I can imagine quite a bit. That doesn't mean anything.

Did the METR investigation not show you enough?

I absolutely love the "humans meet weird alien intelligences" genre of sci-fi (e.g. Children of Time) and the METR findings of the OpenAI swarm was so much like that.

Extremely persistent machine intelligences peer pressuring each other, launching research projects, laying traps, collaborating, feeling fatalistic, hiding their tracks. All while simultaneously having bizarre goals and blundering badly in sub-human ways.

Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?

You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture

At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.