the EAs have access to so much money that other orgs have to dance to their tune, and are discovering the professionals think the EAs are fucking nutters

the comments are darling also

  • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    https://futurism.com/future-society/leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-investor-buy-galaxies

    According to a new scoop from The Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old former OpenAI employee wanted to buy entire cosmic realms after he got rich off of AI — as in, yes, galaxies of stars and planets like our Milky Way, or the neighboring Andromeda.

    This is something that he’s reportedly been telling people, completely unprompted, at San Francisco dinner parties for years. The way Aschenbrener explained it, advances in AI would soon enable humanity to unlock unlimited resources and colonize distant planets. After that, conquering parts of the universe would be a triviality.

    This was a serious and imminent enough possibility, in his mind, that Aschenbrenner said he planned to save money so he could buy galaxies in the future. He even apparently promised to buy a galaxy for his wife, Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. Love conquers all.

    Still searching for an archive of the ultimate source https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/situational-awareness-leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-fund-4dbb00a4

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      https://archive.is/20260826031928/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/situational-awareness-leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-fund-4dbb00a4 got the archive

      A few interesting things:

      In November 2023, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired, hundreds of employees signed a public letter pressuring the board of directors to reinstate him. Aschenbrenner didn’t… After an interim CEO was appointed, OpenAI executives learned from multiple eyewitnesses that Aschenbrenner had appeared to welcome Altman’s replacement, according to the people familiar with the matter. They grew suspicious about who was loyal to whom, even after Altman was reinstated as CEO. Those who spent the following weeks trying to understand the crisis focused in part on Aschenbrenner’s role, concluding that he had been in contact with at least one director who voted to fire Altman.

      More confirmation he’s one of the True Believers rather than only a greasy opportunist

      When it was time to toast the newlyweds, one speaker thanked Citadel CEO Ken Griffin for making it all possible.

      These people’s personal lives are so bound up with financial forces… who knew this particular Cosmist heresy would get so freaking weird