This post demonstrates a willful ignorance of the factors driving so-called "populist techno-pessimism" and I'm sure every time a member of the public is exposed to someone talking like this, their "techno-pessimism" is galvanized
The ire people have toward tech companies right now is, like most ire, perhaps in places overreaching. But it is mostly justified by the real actions of tech companies, and facebook has done more to deserve it than most. The thought process you just described sounds like an accurate prediction of the mindset and culture of a VP within Facebook, and I'd like you to reflect on it for a sec. Basically, you rightly point out that the org releasing what data they have would likely invite lawsuits, and then you proceeded to do some kind of insane offscreen mental gymnastics that allow this reality to mean nothing to you but that the unwashed masses irrationally hate the company for some unknowable reason
Like you're talking about a company that has spent the last decade buying competitors to maintain an insane amount of control over billions of users' access to their friends, feeding them an increasingly degraded and invasive channel of information that also from time to time runs nonconsensual social experiments on them, and following even people who didn't opt in around the internet through shady analytics plugins in order to sell dossiers of information on them to whoever will pay. What do you think it is? Are people just jealous of their success, or might they have some legit grievances that may cause them to distrust and maybe even loathe such an entity? It is hard for me to believe Facebook has a dataset large enough to train a current-gen LLM that wouldn't also feel, viscerally, to many, like a privacy violation. Whether any party that felt this way could actually win a lawsuit is questionable though, as the US doesn't really have signficant privacy laws, and this is partially due to extensive collaboration with, and lobbying by, Facebook and other tech companies who do mass-surveillance of this kind
I remember a movie called Das Leben der Anderen (2006) (Officially translated as "the lives of others") which got accolades for how it could make people who hadn't experienced it feel how unsettling the surveillance state of East Germany was, and now your average American is more comprehensively surveilled than the Stasi could have imagined, and this is in large part due to companies like facebook
Frankly, I'm not an AGI doomer, but if the capabilities of near-future AI systems are even in the vague ballpark of the (fairly unfounded) claims the American tech monopolies make about them, it would be an unprecedented disaster on a global scale if those companies got there first, so inasmuch as we view "AGI research" as something that's inevitably going to hit milestones in corporate labs with secretive datasets, I think we should absolutely kill it to whatever degree is possible, and that's as someone who truly, deeply believes that AI research has been beneficial to humanity and could continue to become moreso