v_maini@v_maini1d ago

I was on the communications & policy team at Google DeepMind from 2018 - 2022. When I first joined GDM, external communication about the possibility of human extinction was not permitted, by anyone, at any level of the organization. If asked about existential risk, researchers were PR trained to respond along the lines of: "It's not useful to engage in that kind of alarmism. Some people confuse AI with movies like Terminator -- that's simply not the reality. The AI we develop will be safe by design. After all, we're building it!" And then steer conversation towards beneficial applications in health, climate, etc. Meanwhile, the internal reality was that AI alignment was not solved, reward hacking was the default behavior of RL agents, and there were far too few people working on the problem. After months of advocacy, the policy was updated: positively valenced, comms-friendly content on AI safety was permitted (like https://t.co/W631ssnlHV). Note the positive, nice-sounding way that it says "superintelligence could lead to human extinction." The gap between the internal reality and external communications is closing because the risk/reward has changed, and because the evidence is harder to dismiss now. Not because it's a PR stunt or political psy-op. The truth is being said out loud because RSI is now so imminent that no other option makes sense.