What This Is
This week a Space appeared on Hugging Face letting users assign themselves an "AI doomsday probability" (P(doom), the percentage chance AI destroys humanity) and post it publicly. P(doom) is a serious concept in AI safety research — organizations like 80,000 Hours and FLI routinely use it to quantify different people's judgments on AGI risk. This time the "check-in" trend comes from the r/LocalLLaMA community, the open-source large-model crowd.
Industry View
Mainstream AI safety institutions tend to publish higher numbers — Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and others have publicly given P(doom) estimates ranging from 5% to 50%. The local open-source community's stance is notably different: they use "check-ins" to deflate the doomer narrative, a gentle form of irony aimed at "AI is about to destroy humanity."
But there's notable pushback: turning serious probability discussions into a game could make it harder for ordinary readers to gauge actual AI safety risk levels. The counter-view: this kind of community behavior exposes an awkward fact — the P(doom) framework itself lacks falsifiability, and the distance between "serious discussion" and "joke" isn't as wide as people assume.
Impact on Regular People
- For enterprise IT: When discussing AI risk internally, expect employee views on "AI danger" to vary far more than you'd assume — don't presume a unified stance.
- For careers: The gap between media "AI apocalypse" framing and what AI insiders actually believe is wide — don't let sensational headlines dictate your anxiety.
- For consumer markets: AI anxiety marketing works precisely because the public lacks a quantitative anchor for real risk — a market signal worth exploiting.