This essay critiques the mainstream coverage of AI existential risk (x-risk), noting its credulous nature and the use of the term 'foom' from children's cartoons. It argues that the alignment debate is artificial and overhyped.
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When AI alignment is packaged as a technical challenge of existential importance, its actual driving force may be closer to product development and commercial monetization. This article examines the tension between mainstream AI safety narratives and commercial reality.
The core definition of AI alignment comes from philosopher Nick Bostrom: ensuring increasingly powerful AI systems align with their builders' intentions. Bostrom considers this a 'technical problem,' despite having little background in machine learning research himself.
This view was adopted by the effective altruism movement, with 80,000 Hours ranking 'alignment technical research and engineering' as the highest-impact career path. However, the dominant alignment research is conducted not by academic institutions but by private companies.
OpenAI and Anthropic are the two core players in AI alignment research. OpenAI publicly lists building superintelligence as a primary goal, citing reasons such as 'bringing an unimaginably better world' and 'cannot be stopped.' But the article points out that revenue has always been a supplementary objective in its governance and product decisions, with CEO Sam Altman explicitly focusing on commercialization in interviews.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees out of concern for OpenAI's profit-seeking tendencies. Yet Anthropic also has a product page, customer case studies, and hundreds of millions in funding. Its research-driven argument—that studying models at the frontier of capabilities is necessary to understand risks—runs parallel to product development.
The article argues that regardless of public statements, these companies are fundamentally building products that need to be sold, accountable, and maintain market share. This 'financial side quest' inevitably complicates alignment research.
The article questions whether current alignment research is truly suited to averting catastrophe. Despite speculative narratives about superintelligence and 'foom,' the actual work is closer to building products users are willing to pay for.
The author notes that AI safety discussions conflate speculative future harms with current real-world harms and lump large language models together with algorithmic decision systems. Alignment research is championed by the effective altruism movement, but its technical path may deviate from the goal of mitigating existential risks.
This article is based on an opinion piece published in The Gradient, with the author taking a critical stance on AI safety narratives. It cites publicly available company statements, interviews, and product pages, but some claims (such as the impact of commercialization on alignment research) are the author's inferences.
Although AI alignment research is framed as a technical challenge of existential importance, its dominant forces are commercial companies, and product development and revenue pressures may steer research away from existential risk mitigation. Readers should distinguish between speculative future harms and current real-world impacts.
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