Comment by janalsncm

Aside from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points others are making, I believe it has something to do with the history of AI research.

There is a big overlap between the “rationalist” and “effective altruist” crowds and some AI research ideas. At a minimum they come from the same philosophy: define an objective, and find methods to optimize that objective. For AI that’s minimizing loss functions with better and better models of the data. For EA, that’s allocating money in ways they think are expectation-maximizing.

Note this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people just want to make money.