On the whole though, I think much of the case by proponents for the importance of working on AI Safety does assume that current paradigm + scale is all you need, or rest on works that assume it.
There were however plenty of people who were loudly arguing that it was important to work on AI x-risk before “the current paradigm” was much of a thing (or in some cases long before “the current paradigm” existed at all), and I think their arguments were sound at the time and remain sound today. (E.g. Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, Yudkowsky, Bostrom, Stuart Russell, Tegmark…) (OpenPhil seems to have started working seriously on AI in 2016, which was 3 years before GPT-2.)
Yeah this is more true than I would like. I try to push back on it where possible, e.g. my post AI doom from an LLM-plateau-ist perspective.
There were however plenty of people who were loudly arguing that it was important to work on AI x-risk before “the current paradigm” was much of a thing (or in some cases long before “the current paradigm” existed at all), and I think their arguments were sound at the time and remain sound today. (E.g. Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, Yudkowsky, Bostrom, Stuart Russell, Tegmark…) (OpenPhil seems to have started working seriously on AI in 2016, which was 3 years before GPT-2.)