Musk is in charge of xAI, one of the only 5 companies in the world that both have access to frontier AI training compute and pursue development of AGI (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta). So seeing unambiguous “annihilation” with a significant weight in his probability distribution (and also on the record) is a notable development. (In 2023 there was a statement on extinction risk signed by Hassabis, Amodei, and Altman, but it didn’t state the weight of the risk, and wasn’t signed by Musk or Zuckerberg.)
Edit: The rest of this comment in its original form got out of hand, you can now read it as a post.
He probably doesn’t have much influence on the public opinion of LessWrong, but as a person in charge of a major AI company, he is obviously a big player.
He owns xAI, a major AI lab, and has a lot of resources to back it. And before xAI, he was one of the founders at OpenAI. With which he now has an ongoing rivalry.
Is he significant/influential as in “if he says something on a topic, that will cause people at LessWrong to change opinions”? Not very.
Is he significant/influential to the field of AI as a whole? Yes, very much so. Like with Yann LeCun, his opinions on AI and AI risks are of some importance on those grounds alone.
How significant/influential is Musk’s opinion on LessWrong? I had the impression it was on the lower end.
Musk is in charge of xAI, one of the only 5 companies in the world that both have access to frontier AI training compute and pursue development of AGI (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta). So seeing unambiguous “annihilation” with a significant weight in his probability distribution (and also on the record) is a notable development. (In 2023 there was a statement on extinction risk signed by Hassabis, Amodei, and Altman, but it didn’t state the weight of the risk, and wasn’t signed by Musk or Zuckerberg.)
Edit: The rest of this comment in its original form got out of hand, you can now read it as a post.
He probably doesn’t have much influence on the public opinion of LessWrong, but as a person in charge of a major AI company, he is obviously a big player.
He owns xAI, a major AI lab, and has a lot of resources to back it. And before xAI, he was one of the founders at OpenAI. With which he now has an ongoing rivalry.
Is he significant/influential as in “if he says something on a topic, that will cause people at LessWrong to change opinions”? Not very.
Is he significant/influential to the field of AI as a whole? Yes, very much so. Like with Yann LeCun, his opinions on AI and AI risks are of some importance on those grounds alone.