The existential risk that has received much attention is machines eventually becoming as smart as people, and then smarter still. What I see in the news, and, anecdotally, around me is rather the opposite. Thinking is hard. People, even those who went through rigorous university training to develop their critical thinking, are increasingly outsourcing thinking to machines. SOTA models don't need to get any better to catch up with us, they just need to wait. And maybe not even that long. I wonder what happens then?

As for my opinion, I am an economist by training. There are many people, many educational systems; the risks stemming from the mistakes people make are idiosyncratic, and they average out in aggregate (to an extent). On the other hand, there are just a few SOTA models. If all thinking is done by them, the aggregate risks will be much larger, I'd suppose.