You might only be hearing about it now but the warnings have been coming (including by those who are now leading the top labs) for a long time, since before any of those “incentives” were in place.
Some of those people in the early days were just letting their imagination run away with them, like that google engineer who thought a chatbot was self-aware, being enslaved, and was in need of rescue. Much of the time they weren't talking about "AI" as it exists, but what AI might maybe one day become. Other times it was purely marketing to make headlines and put the idea in people's (investors) heads that the chatbots were vastly more powerful than they are.
