• @[email protected]
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    2 days ago

    It’s complicated.

    It’s basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.

    Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.

    They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.

    If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 days ago

      They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.

      I have a basic understanding of what EA is but what do you mean by communicating vessels?

      • @[email protected]
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        2 days ago

        EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it’s pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity’s existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.

        Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren’t already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.

        Basically you can’t discuss one without referencing the other.