My model is that Sam Altman regarded the EA world as a memetic threat, early on, and took actions to defuse that threat by paying lip service / taking openphil money / hiring prominent AI safety people for AI safety teams.
In the context of the thread, I took this to suggest that Sam Altman never had any genuine concern about x-risk from AI, or, at a minimum, that any such concern was dominated by the social maneuvering you’re describing. That seems implausible to me given that he publicly expressed concern about x-risk from AI 10 months before OpenAI was publicly founded, and possibly several months before it was even conceived.
I don’t dispute that he never had any genuine concern. I guess that he probably did have genuine concern (though not necessarily that that was his main motivation for founding OpenAI).
Is this taken to be a counterpoint to my story above? I’m not sure exactly how it’s related.
Yes:
In the context of the thread, I took this to suggest that Sam Altman never had any genuine concern about x-risk from AI, or, at a minimum, that any such concern was dominated by the social maneuvering you’re describing. That seems implausible to me given that he publicly expressed concern about x-risk from AI 10 months before OpenAI was publicly founded, and possibly several months before it was even conceived.
I don’t dispute that he never had any genuine concern. I guess that he probably did have genuine concern (though not necessarily that that was his main motivation for founding OpenAI).