Occam's razor is about minimizing the number of assumptions needed for a conclusion. In this case, "they believe it" is the same number of assumptions as "they get paid" - just one.
An assumption is something that we can't know, yet assume is true for the sake of coming up with a theory. What we're assuming here is their intention.
The implication (or as you said, "the links"), that talking about how dangerous their product is leads to more money, is true regardless of their intention. They create hype, they get money, that's not an assumption, that's an observation.
The question is only if their intention was to make money, or are they speaking from the heart. That's the assumption we choose.
> Because we can't observe the counterfactual world, this actually is just an assumption.
If you discard all empirical claims categorically due to "inability to observe the counterfactual world", your own reasoning falls apart. Why would you assume people mean what they say?
> Diving their intention also still requires many assumptions about their intermediate beliefs that I find dubious
You're assuming CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies are honest. I find that dubious.
> If you discard all empirical claims categorically due to "inability to observe the counterfactual world"
I don't.
There are a lot of counterfactuals we can observe empirically.
I'm just saying there is no empirical evidence to support the marketing strategy of "tell people our product is going to kill their families". I believe this is the first time it's been tried out.
No, this is not the first time. Scaremongering by frontier AI CEOs has been going on since ChatGPT came out, every time with a massive investment following.
OpenAI got $10 billion from Microsoft after Sam Altman claimed AI could lead to extinction of humanity.
Anthropic got similar multi-billion dollar funding from Amazon and Google after warning AI could develop biological weapons.
xAI got similarly massive funding after Elon Musk predicted a terminator-style future.
If you don't accept this as "empirical evidence", then there's nothing to discuss.
