Reid Hoffman is an early investor in OpenAI and Anthropic. The play here is to capture and control the technology. They want to install a duopoly that isn't threatened by competition and open source.

My guest on the Karol Markowicz Show today is @JordanSchachtel! We talk AI doomerism and the attempted power grab, robots of the future, how envy kills joy, and so much more. Listen anywhere:

This is Trust & Safety 2.0. The last time we had media-generated panics like this (with Russiagate and Covid), social media companies created “trust & safety” teams to censor conservative and dissident voices. Those hires worked with left-wing NGOs like the SPLC to police public discourse and do an end-run around the First Amendment. It almost worked, until Elon bought Twitter and exposed the whole game in the Twitter Files. This time the plan is to embed unfireable EA minders inside every AI company as the new trust-and-safety layer. The censorship and control will be far more comprehensive, but also more subtle. Anytime they don’t get what they want, this unaccountable NGO layer (with the veneer of “trust the experts” pseudoscience) will shriek to the press that the AI company is risking humanity, and they will be celebrated as “whistleblowers.” These groups haven’t earned our trust, and their agenda is not our safety.

I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse. By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this. A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.

WATCH: Professor @pmddomingos: "Europe actually passed this AI Act some years ago that puts draconian restrictions on AI.... Europe is now out of the AI race. I hope we're not gonna let the same thing happen in America."

There is no “Godfather of AI” Countless individuals have contributed immensely to the field. Some media outlets want to fool the public into supporting his (and Hinton’s) calls for degrowth socialism. Innovation cannot be declared illegal. Stop the fearmongering nonsense.

.@PalantirTech CTO @ssankar calls out AI doomerists for what they really are: “this is really a religion, a cult-like belief, a doomsday cult.” It’s time to ditch the “end of the world” obsession and focus on what AI can actually do: grow our economy, support workers and businesses, and cut costs for American consumers.

🚨 Sacks: They want a WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION for AI @DavidSacks: “When it comes to AI safety, we need the companies themselves to internalize the sense of responsibility — not try to externalize it onto Beijing or Brussels.” “It’s your responsibility to make it safe.”

🤖AI doomerism: genuine danger or coordinated political psyop From a viral twitter thread, synchronized with a major news story, a barrage of coordinated tweets from Democrat, and a new suite of self-serving regulations, the doomer news boomlet feels like a well-planned psyop.

The Environmental Law Institute has become the CCP’s middleman. ELI's radical climate litigation undermines US energy security, weakens our industrial capacity, and makes us dependent on Chinese tech that is full of kill switches. It's time for Congress to investigate.