I suspect that he realized that there's money to be made being the professional luddite of the hot thing du jour that talk shows and schools can give him money for (as so many other people have done for other things), and he's taking this simple claim of 'AGI will murder us all' to get on as many talk shows as possible and make as much money off of it. I doubt he's speaking in public out of any concern for humanity's survival.
It's such an easy claim to make, because you can just say 'yeah, AGI hasn't murdered us all yet, but it will at some point' and keep kicking out that timeline further and further out until your dead and buried and who cares.
I think that's the point, this has been his personal obsession for more than a decade now, and so he's jumping at the opportunity to link it to the latest hot news topic without real consideration for how related LLM AI is to the AGI he's been writing and fantasizing about for so long.
It's such an easy claim to make, because you can just say 'yeah, AGI hasn't murdered us all yet, but it will at some point' and keep kicking out that timeline further and further out until your dead and buried and who cares.