Among the A.I. Doomsayers

“The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years—but it’s certainly a small world. Everyone is hopelessly mixed up in everyone else’s life, which would be messy but basically unremarkable if not for the colossal sums of money involved. Anthropic received a half-billion-dollar investment from the cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, shortly before he was arrested on fraud charges. Open Philanthropy, a foundation distributing the fortune of the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, has funded nearly every A.I.-safety initiative; it also gave thirty million dollars to OpenAI in 2017, and got one board seat. (At the time, the head of Open Philanthropy was living with Christiano, employing Christiano’s future wife, and engaged to Daniela Amodei, an OpenAI employee who later co-founded Anthropic.) “It’s an absolute clusterfuck,” an employee at an organization funded by Open Philanthropy told me. “I brought up once what their conflict-of-interest policy was, and they just laughed.” (The New Yorker)

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SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft made it to space and traveled more than halfway around the world Thursday before coming to a fiery end over the Indian Ocean, in the most successful demonstration to date of the vehicle NASA has chosen to one day land astronauts on the moon. While the spacecraft did not survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, it completed a number of key milestones that were hailed as major steps toward helping SpaceX perfect the art of flying the world’s largest and most powerful rocket. In addition to a near-perfect launch, the craft flew for nearly an hour after lifting off from SpaceX’s private launch site in South Texas near the Gulf of Mexico. (via Elon Musk /Washington Post)

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