What choice did they have. The media and the masses ignored the clear bio threat from AI (as undeniably proved by them getting a 99% on biology focused multiple choice quizzes rigorous PhD level benchmarks, which everyone knows is a great way to evaluate PhD level biology and wetlab skill). And the media took the hugging faces hack seriously. So clearly Anthropic just needs to show their AIs manufacturing a genuine pandemic!
HPMOR does have one great lesson that all the rationalist and even Eliezer himself have failed to internalize: Fascists should be decapitated.
The EA/lesswronger attitude of āassuming good faithā (to the right people) and taking shit too seriously does play perfectly off of Trumpās blatantly hollow and shallow rhetorical shenanigans.
A year might be enough time for the bubble to start leaking faster or the pop to become outright undeniable. And from what Iāve picked up from Ed Zitronās reporting, a lot of the bigger data center deals are kind of tenuous to begin with (sketchy financing, no ability to actually meet overly aggressive timelines even with optimal money and no regulation, etc.). So anything helps.
Going on a bit of a tangentā¦ Eliezer (and lots of rationalists) are so certain only international deals driven by their ideology have any hope of really stopping AGI (Eliezerās Only Law Can Prevent Extinction is mostly about not supporting direct extralegal action against AI, but it also implies this, and of course AI 2040 is fixated on some cartoonishly impossible international deal), it would be funny if the surge data center opposition for purely pragmatic reasons prove to be a major cause of the bubble finally popping.
See, if they just came out and admitted to that sort of strategy, I could at least respect it some, but instead they still seem to insist on acting like and planning for Trump being somewhat of a rational actor!
Iāve previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436
tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.
The exchange with niknoble in the comments was also my favorite. He notes the democrat party is actually the best bet for getting regulation on AI:
More generally, acceleration wins by default if everyone follows their local financial incentives, and the only force Iāve seen overpower capital at scale is the will of the Democratic Party of the United States.
He is maybe giving Democrat too much credit, but yeah, if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.
Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often canāt stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.
You knowā¦ from a big brain game theory perspective (rationalists love trying to take that perspective)ā¦ Eliezer is actually rewarding Trumpās tantrum by demanding EA bow to the right.
Rationalist have never run into a right-wing talking point or person they were unwilling to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.
It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.
Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.
Lol, I called it without even having to see it. Doubling down and blaming EAs for being too left even as the right curbstomps them. How does that boot taste?
Also, WTF does Eliezer even think āleftistā means?
This is hilarious. I didnāt think it was possible, but maybe the lesswrongers and EAs will finally realize they are in a leopards-eating-face moment?
Or maybe they will double down? I.e. they conclude that if they were less woke maybe Trump wouldnāt have turned on them? Haha.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Nah, lesswrongers donāt even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.
āDemocrat-polarizedā is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democratās fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.
The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM
One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:
For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: Heās not on your side. Heās against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and theyāre not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.
Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldnāt have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropicās half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.
Because rationalists distrust mainstream normal science and skepticism, they are far more willing to dabble in mysticism and the supernatural than normal skeptics.
I am also questioning OpenAIās strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.
They want to sell the claim that theyāve āachieved AGIā. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of āthe computer talks back to youā, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.
The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM āsuccessā.
Trueā¦ except for the fact that some of them were there at the start. Like, for example, Nick Bostrom had some pretty racist/eugenicist stuff come out from the 90s when he was on some mailing lists and 90s nets. Nick Bostrom was a founding member of the Future of Humanity Institute, along with Toby Ord (another EA founding member) and they got money from Elon Musk.