Once you have an intelligent AI, it doesn’t really matter how you got there—at some point, you either take humans out of the loop because using slow, functionally-retarded bags of twitching meat as computational components is dumb, or you’re out-competed by imitator projects that do. Then you’ve just got an AI with goals, and bootstrapping tends to follow. Then we all die. Their approach isn’t any safer, they just have different ideas about how to get a seed AI (and ideas, I’d note, that make it much harder to define a utility function that we like).
Once you have an intelligent AI, it doesn’t really matter how you got there—at some point, you either take humans out of the loop because using slow, functionally-retarded bags of twitching meat as computational components is dumb, or you’re out-competed by imitator projects that do. Then you’ve just got an AI with goals, and bootstrapping tends to follow. Then we all die. Their approach isn’t any safer, they just have different ideas about how to get a seed AI (and ideas, I’d note, that make it much harder to define a utility function that we like).