Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI in 2023 by the nonprofit board. After considerable internal turmoil and external pressure from his venture capitalist mates and from Microsoft, he was reinstated. K…
Big effort post… reading it will still be less effort than listening to the full Behind the Bastards podcast, so I hope you appreciate it…
To summarize it from a personal angle…
In 2011, I was a high school who liked Harry Potter fanfics. I found Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality a fun story, so I went to the lesswrong website and was hooked on all the neat pop-science explanations. The AGI stuff and cryonics and transhumanist stuff seemed a bit fanciful but neat (after all, the present would seem strange and exciting to someone from a hundred years ago). Fast forward to 2015, HPMOR was finally finishing, I was finishing my undergraduate degree, and in the course of getting a college education I had actually taken some computer science and machine learning courses. Reconsidering lesswrong with my level of education then… I noticed MIRI (the institute Eliezer founded) wasn’t actually doing anything with neural nets, they were playing around with math abstractions, and they hadn’t actually published much formal writing, and even the informal lesswrong posts had basically stopped. I had gotten into a related blog, slatestarcodex (written by Scott Alexander), which filled some of the same niche, but in 2016 Scott published a defense of Trump normalizing him, and I realized Scott had an agenda at cross purposes with the “center-left” perspective he portrayed himself as. At around that point, I found the reddit version of sneerclub and it connected a lot of dots I had been missing. Far from the AI expert he presented himself as, Eliezer had basically done nothing but write loose speculation on AGI and pop-science explanations. And Scott Alexander was actually trying to push “human biodiversity” (i.e. racism disguised in pseudoscience) and neoreactionary/libertarian beliefs. From there, it became apparent to me a lot of Eliezer’s claims weren’t just a bit fanciful, they were actually really really ridiculous, and the community he had setup had a deeply embedded racist streak.
To summarize it focusing on Eliezer…
Late 1990s Eliezer was on various mailing lists, speculating with bright eyed optimism about nanotech and AGI and genetic engineering and cryonics. He tried his hand at getting in on it, first trying to write a stock trading bot… which didn’t work, then trying to write up seed AI (AI that would bootstrap to strong AGI and change the world)… which also didn’t work; then trying to develop a new programming language for AI… which he never finished. Then he realized he had been reckless, an actually successful AI might have destroyed mankind, so really it was lucky he didn’t succeed, he needed to figure out how to align an AI first. So from the mid 2000s on he started getting donors (this is where Thiel comes in) to fund his research. People kind of thought he was a crank, or just didn’t seem concerned with his ideas, so he concluded they must not be rational enough, and set about, first on Overcoming bias, then his own blog, lesswrong, writing a sequence of blog posts to fix that (and putting any actual AI research on hold). They got moderate attention which exploded in the early 2010s when a side project of writing Harry Potter fanfiction took off. He used this fame to get more funding and spread his ideas further. Finally, around mid 2010s, he pivoted to actually trying to do AI research again… MIRI has a sparse (compared to number of researchers they hired and how productive good professors in academia are) collection of papers focused on an abstract concept for AI called AIXI, that basically depends on having infinite computing power and isn’t remotely implementable in the real world. Last I checked they didn’t get any further than that. Eliezer was skeptical of neural network approaches, derisively thinking of them as voodoo science trying to blindly imitate biology with no proper understanding, so he wasn’t prepared for NN taking off mid 2012 and leading to GPT and LLM approaches. So when ChatGPT starts looking impressive, he starts panicking, leading to him going on a podcast circuit professing doom (after all if he and his institute couldn’t figure out AI alignment, no one can, and we’re likely all doomed for reasons he has written tens of thousands of words in blog posts about without being refuted at a quality he believes is valid).
To tie off some side points:
Peter Thiel was one of the original funders of Eliezer and his institution. It was probably a relatively cheap attempt to buy reputation, and it worked to some extent. Peter Thiel has cut funding since Eliezer went full doomer (Thiel probably wanted Eliezer as a silicon valley hype man, not an apocalypse cult).
As Scott continued to write posts defending the far-right with a weird posture of being center-left, Slatestarcodex got an increasingly racist audience, culminating in a spin-off forum with full on 14 words white supremacists. He has played a major role in the alt-right pipeline that is some of Trump’s most loyal supporters.
Lesswrong also attracted some of the neoreactionaries (libertarian wackjobs that want a return to monarchy), among them Menicus Moldbug (real name Curtis Yarvin). Yarvin has written about strategies for dismantling the federal government, which DOGE is now implementing
Eliezer may not have been much of a researcher himself, but he inspired a bunch of people, so a lot of OpenAI researchers buy into the hype and/or doom. Sam Altman uses Eliezer’s terminology as marketing hype.
As for lesswrong itself… what is original isn’t good and what’s good isn’t original. Lots of the best sequences are just a remixed form of books like Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. And the worst sequences demand you favor Eliezer’s take on bayesianism over actual science, or are focused on the coming AI salvation/doom.
Feel free to ask any follow-up questions if you genuinely want to know more. If you actually already know about this stuff and are looking for a chance to evangelize for lesswrong or the coming LLM God, the mods can smell that out and you will be shown the door, so don’t bother (we get one or two people like that every couple of weeks).
Big effort post… reading it will still be less effort than listening to the full Behind the Bastards podcast, so I hope you appreciate it…
To summarize it from a personal angle…
In 2011, I was a high school who liked Harry Potter fanfics. I found Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality a fun story, so I went to the lesswrong website and was hooked on all the neat pop-science explanations. The AGI stuff and cryonics and transhumanist stuff seemed a bit fanciful but neat (after all, the present would seem strange and exciting to someone from a hundred years ago). Fast forward to 2015, HPMOR was finally finishing, I was finishing my undergraduate degree, and in the course of getting a college education I had actually taken some computer science and machine learning courses. Reconsidering lesswrong with my level of education then… I noticed MIRI (the institute Eliezer founded) wasn’t actually doing anything with neural nets, they were playing around with math abstractions, and they hadn’t actually published much formal writing, and even the informal lesswrong posts had basically stopped. I had gotten into a related blog, slatestarcodex (written by Scott Alexander), which filled some of the same niche, but in 2016 Scott published a defense of Trump normalizing him, and I realized Scott had an agenda at cross purposes with the “center-left” perspective he portrayed himself as. At around that point, I found the reddit version of sneerclub and it connected a lot of dots I had been missing. Far from the AI expert he presented himself as, Eliezer had basically done nothing but write loose speculation on AGI and pop-science explanations. And Scott Alexander was actually trying to push “human biodiversity” (i.e. racism disguised in pseudoscience) and neoreactionary/libertarian beliefs. From there, it became apparent to me a lot of Eliezer’s claims weren’t just a bit fanciful, they were actually really really ridiculous, and the community he had setup had a deeply embedded racist streak.
To summarize it focusing on Eliezer…
Late 1990s Eliezer was on various mailing lists, speculating with bright eyed optimism about nanotech and AGI and genetic engineering and cryonics. He tried his hand at getting in on it, first trying to write a stock trading bot… which didn’t work, then trying to write up seed AI (AI that would bootstrap to strong AGI and change the world)… which also didn’t work; then trying to develop a new programming language for AI… which he never finished. Then he realized he had been reckless, an actually successful AI might have destroyed mankind, so really it was lucky he didn’t succeed, he needed to figure out how to align an AI first. So from the mid 2000s on he started getting donors (this is where Thiel comes in) to fund his research. People kind of thought he was a crank, or just didn’t seem concerned with his ideas, so he concluded they must not be rational enough, and set about, first on Overcoming bias, then his own blog, lesswrong, writing a sequence of blog posts to fix that (and putting any actual AI research on hold). They got moderate attention which exploded in the early 2010s when a side project of writing Harry Potter fanfiction took off. He used this fame to get more funding and spread his ideas further. Finally, around mid 2010s, he pivoted to actually trying to do AI research again… MIRI has a sparse (compared to number of researchers they hired and how productive good professors in academia are) collection of papers focused on an abstract concept for AI called AIXI, that basically depends on having infinite computing power and isn’t remotely implementable in the real world. Last I checked they didn’t get any further than that. Eliezer was skeptical of neural network approaches, derisively thinking of them as voodoo science trying to blindly imitate biology with no proper understanding, so he wasn’t prepared for NN taking off mid 2012 and leading to GPT and LLM approaches. So when ChatGPT starts looking impressive, he starts panicking, leading to him going on a podcast circuit professing doom (after all if he and his institute couldn’t figure out AI alignment, no one can, and we’re likely all doomed for reasons he has written tens of thousands of words in blog posts about without being refuted at a quality he believes is valid).
To tie off some side points:
Peter Thiel was one of the original funders of Eliezer and his institution. It was probably a relatively cheap attempt to buy reputation, and it worked to some extent. Peter Thiel has cut funding since Eliezer went full doomer (Thiel probably wanted Eliezer as a silicon valley hype man, not an apocalypse cult).
As Scott continued to write posts defending the far-right with a weird posture of being center-left, Slatestarcodex got an increasingly racist audience, culminating in a spin-off forum with full on 14 words white supremacists. He has played a major role in the alt-right pipeline that is some of Trump’s most loyal supporters.
Lesswrong also attracted some of the neoreactionaries (libertarian wackjobs that want a return to monarchy), among them Menicus Moldbug (real name Curtis Yarvin). Yarvin has written about strategies for dismantling the federal government, which DOGE is now implementing
Eliezer may not have been much of a researcher himself, but he inspired a bunch of people, so a lot of OpenAI researchers buy into the hype and/or doom. Sam Altman uses Eliezer’s terminology as marketing hype.
As for lesswrong itself… what is original isn’t good and what’s good isn’t original. Lots of the best sequences are just a remixed form of books like Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. And the worst sequences demand you favor Eliezer’s take on bayesianism over actual science, or are focused on the coming AI salvation/doom.
Feel free to ask any follow-up questions if you genuinely want to know more. If you actually already know about this stuff and are looking for a chance to evangelize for lesswrong or the coming LLM God, the mods can smell that out and you will be shown the door, so don’t bother (we get one or two people like that every couple of weeks).
Excellent primer. It would fit well into this thread if you wanna link it there https://awful.systems/post/3935670