Got it? Fukuyama Thought must be upheld. That's the great promise of AI. Dario is building the last Wunderwaffe for Francis. His references are very quaint. I can imagine him, in another life, as a professor in Princeton, fidgeting before a blackboard, citing Pinker (hip new book! recommended to curious young colleagues!) and waxing poetic about "liberal institutions" and the promise of South Africa post-apartheid.
Yes, this is exactly my point, which is why I’m sure I must be making it poorly.
This is boring, dull, milquetoast, whatever you want to call it undergraduate neolib essay writing of the kind that was played out when I was at college a decade ago. It was played out a decade before that, honestly. These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them. They are the boilerplate, standard views you’ll find in any (Western) UN worker or think tank report writer or ESG consultant or World Bank graduate trainee. This is relevant. Even Scott has his strange ideological idiosyncrasies, Dario has none. Is that not curious? This is a relatively intelligent man, after all. Yet his views on democracy, geopolitics, liberalism, blah blah are those of the average summer intern at the European Union? They’re the views of the professor of your introduction to political science 101 class at a third-tier British university? No, I find that unlikely. Those in this rationalist space who care about geopolitics, and there are and were many, regardless of ideology, did not just ctrl-c and v 104 IQ midwit texts by Fukuyama and Pinker. If they agreed with the thrust, they had the good sense to dress it up. Bill Gates and Obama have more considered, more nuanced views than those expressed in Amodei’s limited writings.
He has notoriously bad chemistry with this admin, relative to all other lab CEOs.
The others have their autism under control, except for Musk, who I think is in genuine awe of Trump, wants his affection, and also agrees with him politically more than the rest.
And of course if you're a Zionist, you can be justifiably concerned about the decline of American hegemony and the loss of the only superpower backing your homeland.
Are the Zionists selling American secrets to the Chinese or terrified of their rise? Sometimes both, perhaps, but I don’t think China will determine the outcome of that conflict.
This isn't Donroe Doctrine, in Policy on AI Exponential he devotes substantial space to "checks and balances" within democracies, which is a curious choice if you want Don's favor.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged (a couple of large Utah business concerns do a lot of business there, and the CCP very quietly allowed in some more Mormon missionaries). Do you think Dario Amodei unilaterally refuses to sell Claude to the Chinese, unlike all his competitors? Does he go on a one-man crusade while Sam Altman and Jensen Huang run a GPU-and-GPT roadshow through every second and third tier city in China?
I doubt it.
2rafa
8hr ago
If the Chinese had democratic elections they’d vote to invade Taiwan. Putin was legitimately very popular, at least until very recently. Warmongers and authoritarians win legitimately all the time.
Dude It’s Summer (in the British Isles). Come back in December when it gets dark at 2.30 and you haven’t seen the sun in six weeks and talk to us about the color of happiness. This is like when you’re happy on vacation.
2rafa
18hr ago
The vast majority of both Filipino and Ukrainian emigrants are female. In the latter case this may have also been true even before the war, I think.
Is there any record of Amodei having hostility toward China that predates the first Trump admin’s pivot against Chinese trade? It’s manifestly obvious that his pivot against China is him trying to keep his contracts and export licenses by aligning himself with the current administration. Who cares more about China, Trump or Amodei?
Painting Amodei as an American ultranationalist ideologically hostile to China is ridiculous. EA was never particularly hostile to China. AI 2027 will go down in history as an embarrassingly timed piece that failed to anticipate Chinese models catching up as rapidly as they have. Many made that mistake, though, including you.
Dario is the poster boy of Eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire, like it or not.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes? The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where every other guy has a Chinese wife with an affluent and family back in China (it’s not easy to afford $400k Stanford tuition for your daughter as a regular Chinese family)? The eternal liberal San Francisco empire at the end of history, where defense spending was taboo and anti-ESG until 2022, where plane loads of Apple engineers departed weekly for Chinese factories, where many of the most sensitive and leading American software and hardware companies heavily recruited Chinese engineers one masters, PhD or undergraduate degree out from mainland China, who often returned there after learning the trade?
The US position on China shifted because of Trump and a relatively small number of people in the largely East Coast defense establishment who care about stuff like Taiwan and who never really liked the Red Chinese. It had nothing to do with San Francisco, which was and remains deeply economically and culturally integrated with China, more than any other western city other than perhaps Vancouver. And as for Amodei himself, Jewish-Italian progressive liberal autistic programmers are not a core anti-Chinese or nationalist demographic in the United States. They never have been and never will be. I can believe that Lutnick really wants to compete with China. There are plenty of elderly neocons and paleocons and just anti-communists and (let’s be real) racists who do. But Amodei? No, nothing in his demographic profile suggests this is a deeply held ideology.
The final redoubt, really, of this argument (once you strip out desperately sucking up to Trump until the IPO gets out of the door) is that Amodei said some vaguely EAesque things about democracy and authoritarianism and other boring liberal platitudes. These are Trudeauisms or Blairisms or whatever you want to call them. They exist in that meaningless void, that ideological interregnum from 1991 to 2016 when people clapped politely at these kinds of empty statements. Dario Amodei is not willing to die to fight China (and as you note, in any conflict he would be a high priority target, so this is no empty consideration).
2rafa
1d ago
Why do you think Amodei wants to destroy China? Most EAs never cared much about China. There were even pro-China people, this is after all a movement about maximally lifting people out of poverty or saving lives at the lowest cost or something. US competitors are as much or more of an ASI risk, including that run by Altman, who he seemingly hates. Does he hate Xi more? Seems unlikely. Why? Fanatic China haters typically belong to other demographic, ideological etc categories.
OpenAI via Microsoft makes its models effectively publicly available to with few or no limitations to Chinese businesses.
Anthropic doesn’t, in part to try to ingratiate themselves with the current admin that (not incorrectly) perceives them as more committed anti-Trumpers and effective altruists compared to Altman’s entirely mercenary nature.
[yes, all the big labs, big tech can get around it, and so can individual developers and small businesses with redistribution, but it is an even minor inconvenience.]
But the bigger picture is that Amodei actually has some minor fears about a Yud-level doom scenario. He’s not Scott level, but this guy lived in a group house with EA people for a decade. Altman doesn’t care, doesn’t know, doesn’t believe in X risk beyond a marketing tool. I actually don’t think Sam has a psychological conception of ASI, it exists as something other people discuss, or a business direction, but it has no eschatological significance.
When Amodei was sitting alongside Benioff hyping up his obsolete SaaS stack to investors / the press as AI proof because they did a big deal with him, you could tell the former was awkward, didn’t believe, was roped into this marketing exercise. This is a guy who was seduced and worn down into marriage by one of Eric Schmidt’s girls in her late thirties (after zero qualifications, another failed marriage and one bankruptcy, a nobody), his social skills are limited. He finds it hard to lie about his actual beliefs, clearly. It’s difficult for anyone who wants to pursue AI very quickly with no limits (not that it is realistic), be they Chinese or American, to convince him. Sam would just have sat at the press conference with a straight face and said AI will create far more jobs than it destroys.
You can’t really turn a guy like Amodei in that way, only remove him from power. In control of the right model at the right time, he might actually do some wacky shit, whereas Altman actually does want to be a rich guy on earth who makes it to his next botox appointment.
2rafa
3d ago
I agree. I’d put it this way - there were indeed senior Iranian politicians who agreed to the Obama deal sincerely, in the sense that they didn’t think they were tricking the enemy and didn’t intend for their country to develop nuclear weapons anyway.
However, the IRGC, which by this point fully ran the nuclear program, was largely governed by a hardliner faction, now fully in charge, who had every intention of fully continuing the program regardless.
2rafa
4d ago
11% or so are Jewish. This tracks generally with the 5x overrepresentation you see in many groups where most or all members are cognitively well above the IQ average but which are not, for cultural or communal reasons, ‘specifically Jewish’.
For example, I think around 10% of congress is Jewish, or was for a long time. I would guess things like Fortune 500 executives, leading authors, scientific researchers, more cognitively challenging specialty doctors etc are maybe also around 10% Jewish in the US. Hollywood might be more like 30% (albeit declining rapidly), and finance maybe 20%, but this is above the ‘default’ overrepresentation and reflects actual cultural preference (Jews have been very overrepresented as bankers, actors, publishers and theater impresarios for many centuries).
2rafa
10d ago
There are two main kinds of vigilante, one politically more ambivalent than the other. The first is the justicar, the knight, the semi-sanctioned or unsanctioned sheriff who corrects the mistake of a hopelessly and explicitly corrupt governing structure co-opted by explicitly political interests in a way that deprives the masses of justice. This is Batman. The second category is more explicitly right wing, the vigilante against anarchy-tyranny, against the criminal masses, against the mob. This is more explicitly right wing, Curtis Sliwa, Daniel Penny, that kind of thing.
The easy way to tell which kind of vigilante story it is is to ask yourself - “do the criminal villains in this story broadly and demographically represent the real perpetrators of most urban violent crime in the location in which this story is set?”. If no, it’s the former, if yes, it’s the latter.
2rafa
12d ago
Don’t you need to have a relationship with a college to do anything at Oxbridge? The University itself is just the overarching administrative body.
2rafa
12d ago
Cofnas’ views preclude winning over any credentialed progressives, even moreso than most right wing academics.
2rafa
13d ago
He probably thought he was fine after they hired him. His reporting on Arday was hardly more controversial than the widely publicized statements that got him cancelled years earlier…until Arday’s death.
2rafa
13d ago
No American university would ever have hired Cofnas after he was removed from Cambridge for his views (and indeed, none did).
2rafa
13d ago
Cofnas was fired by Cambridge for his views, so it’s interesting that he’s now being fired by the university that hired him afterwards (and which was surely able to Google him before offering him a place).
2rafa
14d ago
I don’t think the US won the Iran War (2025-ongoing). The obvious aim of the war, whatever you believe, was the overthrow of the Islamic Revolution and the fomenting of a popular uprising after the assassination of most of its leadership. That manifestly failed.
However, I also think the pro-Iranian case failed to materialize. Projections of $250/bbl from even reputable analysts have clearly not come true so far. Oil is less important and more widely sourced than it was during the oil crises of fifty years ago. The Iranian endgame remains unclear. They have suffered genuine setbacks, militarily and economically. The relationship with the UAE, where a huge proportion of Iranian exports are (were?) arranged, sold, managed, invested in, will take a very long time to recover.
Oil flows can be routed around the Hormuz. A Houthi gambit will just force the Saudis and Emiratis back together, and more fervently than before, which would be costly in Yemen. Even the Shia Iraqi state seems largely more interested in prosperity and economic growth than it is in supporting the holy war of its coreligionists in Persia. The more they push, the more likely the GCC states export via pipeline, something made much more easy in new routes via newly allied Syria. Iran could bomb the pipelines, but that would be a challenging escalation.
All the while, the world learns to adapt. The Iranian position weakens as time goes on and oil doesn’t spike to $250. The Strait of Hormuz becomes ever less important the longer it’s closed. They can obtain nuclear weapons, which guard against invasion, but do not sustain the axis of resistance.
2rafa
15d ago
I don’t think the full truth of Wexner and Epstein’s relationship will come out for a while, if ever. My understanding is that Wexner was always zionist (as zionism generally becomes more fervent the smaller a jewish community is outside of israel, growing up in ohio probably made him moreso than most), but that Epstein pushed him to become more involved in galas, events, the MEGA group in part as way to expand Epstein’s own social circle. He did this with plenty of secular / non-Jewish civic events too, hence the endless pictures of Epstein at everything, but that was part of it.
But the money isn’t particularly interesting. Israel in the late 80s and early 90s was poor, much poorer than most other developed countries. GDP per capita was half that of the UK for example, which Israel has now overtaken. The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity (and given even Israeli Jews have been arrested for spying for Iran in the most recent war, that’s hardly a guarantee).
A real diversified retail conglomerate type billionaire with (unlike say a lot of tech billionaires) a lot of relatively liquid assets is a whale fall event for anyone who has any proximity to the money, especially in a decade when equities returned like 500%. 2 and 20 was more than enough, even with Epstein making relatively poor financial decisions (and he mostly seems to have just handed Wexner’s money to a few big Wall Street banks, which would have made him one of their largest and most lucrative wealth management clients ever - since other people with that net worth would have more competent family offices unwilling to hand $20m a year to JP Morgan to do nothing) he could siphon several hundred million dollars.
His net worth actually seems to have peaked in 2008, but he lost a lot of money in the crash having invested in some CLO funds.
2rafa
18d ago
I am not scared of being dead.
One is here, then one is gone, or maybe somewhere else. Either way, if someone told me that I would die at some point in the next seventy years, painlessly, healthy and happy one moment and deceased the next, I would be relieved rather than anxious.
But I am terrified of a painful death and especially of dying slowly and painfully. That is what haunts me. The statistics on euthanasia are clear; for every autistic 25 year old attention seeking woman who has talked herself into depression (and who might well kill herself anyway eventually) there are fifty people who are very sick and in pain from severe and often terminal illness, every breath a torture, pumped full of medication, aching, kept alive by drugs and machines, living to suffer.
In a fair world, their suffering should take priority over some moron who hates their life, sorry.
2rafa
18d ago
High school students, local business owners, people filing regulatory documents etc can be dumb, but they’re less dumb than the regulators think.
Pretty soon every one of them will know the meta is to either use Chinese/otherwise open source LLMs on grey market sites that don’t do this, or pass answers from regular ones through them if that’s a viable way of evading a watermark. No local LLM or powerful hardware required, although pretty soon even local models capable of running on the latest iPhone will do most of what normal people use LLMs for well enough.
2rafa
19d ago
In every major war there are a class of people who make a lot of money even if overall people are poorer and indeed even if overall inequality declines (usually due to market crashes or broader asset price declines). War involves many government contracts, price fixing, import and export controls, sometimes currency controls, and all these things create huge room for profiteering and arbitrage.
The Miami of today is full of people who got rich in shady business in Latin America or in crypto. The Miami of 1944 already had plenty of the former but a lot of people who had done well off the war, too.
2rafa
19d ago
You had flophouses (where nobody would stay for long if they could help it) all the way up through factory town lodgings or urban apartments.
Yes, I’m sympathetic to people who say the rent is too damn high, but the period when young people could easily rent an apartment in the big city by themselves without inherited money was very brief historically speaking - it probably lasted less than thirty years (maybe 1955 to 1985?). A century ago, your current equivalent of a modern day 25 year old corporate striver (a young clerk at a bank or insurance company, say, or a trainee typist or secretary) would have stayed in a boarding house in a small room or sharing a small room for a large percentage of their income.
2rafa
19d ago
It’s a dumb term since I’ve never heard of an AirBnB providing breakfast, if it did it would just be a small hotel (or, indeed, a bnb).
2rafa
19d ago
I think the shift probably happened in white collar work between around 1920 and 1950, there were a lot of quiet development around intra office memos, telephone calls becoming ubiquitous, a focus on data, corporate consolidation, vastly increased access to information etc. Also, any change would be swamped by falls in salaried or working class hours as paid vacation, weekends etc became more common.
I think the summer in Britain is much better than the summer in India, though. It might actually be the best summer in the whole world, in my opinion. I actually thought you’d only moved a year ago, but time is passing so quickly now, well…
I’m a very happy for your newfound happiness. I am skeptical your depression was ever as serious as you feared, but as someone who was there and who also randomly, arbitrarily overcame it for no real reason (I think I have probably written about it before) I understand. Still, winter is the real test.
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