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A pretty clear admission that Twitter failed as a distribution channel.

If affectation requires insincerity, I actually don't think Yud is insincere, at least not about his core beliefs. Do I believe it's a poorly wrought novel of ideas that fails to achieve a respectable aesthetic end? Yes. There are many ways to craft a novel of ideas and not all of them involve inflicting pain on scantily clad heroines. These are choices Yud made for the book, which coincidentally echo non-mainstream choices he has made for his lifestyle over the years.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00J6XXP9K/allbooks

o1 does everything I need.

I didn't claim Gwern was a wordcel. He's clearly not. Dwarkesh, yes.

I didn't claim Yudkowsky was an EA. He's not. He's a rationalist who originated many thoughts about AI doom, which have influenced EAs.

Look, Gwern and Dwarkesh and Yud are all AI doomers, which is where the rationalists and the EAs overlap. Gwern is all over LessWrong, which kind of springs out of the rationalist community and has all sorts of EAs there now. But of course, the first rule of EA is the first rule of Fight Club. That's why Dario consistently denies he's an EA, even though his chief of staff was formerly running Sam Bankman-Fried's philanthropic grants.

The weird thing in these conversations between guys like Dwarkesh and Gwern is how much they wallow in the masochism of imagining a world taken over by AGI. Yud has a similar attraction to pain, but he channels it into his silly BDSM novels.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Lords-Answer-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-e...

If that's how they wan't to spend their time, fine. Let's all just recognize it's an acquired taste, a self-indulgence, and the furthest thing from a rational act.

Lots of the claims about Gwern in the intro are exaggerated.

Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work.

He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle.

By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs.

People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview.

It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.