16 Nobel laureates signed a vague AI warning. The three CEOs actually building the thing didn’t.

So a bunch of economists (Brynjolfsson, Agrawal, Korinek, Cunningham, released through Stanford's Digital Economy Lab) put out this three-sentence statement on AI's economic impact, and somehow it's picked up 200+ signatures, sixteen of them Nobel laureates. Paul Krugman's on there, which is funny given he's the guy who said back in 1998 the internet would matter about as much as the fax machine. So is Yann LeCun, who was calling a much more specific version of this exact warning "ridiculously stupid" earlier this year.

Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, the three people actually running the labs building this stuff, none of them signed. Ten signatories do work at Anthropic though (including one of the four people who organized the letter), so yeah, that's the obvious "wait, isn't this just labs recruiting credibility" angle right there.

I went and looked up who those Anthropic-adjacent names actually are before deciding what to think. Most of them are just researchers with no PR or company-messaging role at all, Sholto Douglas, Boaz Barak, that tier. Feels unfair to assume a scientist can't hold a real opinion about their own field just because of who signs their paycheck. There's a smaller handful though, Jack Clark, Sarah Friar (OpenAI's CFO), Jeff Dean, where the conflict-of-interest read gets a lot more plausible. No way to actually tell from outside which is which. Probably both types signed this, not just one or the other.

And, Acemoglu. Won the 2024 Nobel, spent years being the guy pushing back on doom-y AI-jobs predictions, and he signed anyway (still doesn't sound fully sold on the aggressive timelines from what I've read, just less dismissive than before). An economist like that, no real stake in the outcome either way, putting his name on a "let's actually prepare for this" statement instead of the usual doom-or-hype binary, that's the part of this whole thing that feels like it's worth something.

anyway, what yall think? Does mixing real researchers in with lab leadership on the same signature list make this more credible to you, or less?

I made this with gpt image 2