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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, right now is when OpenAI is the least impressive relative to competitors ever since they kicked off the modern LLM chatbot era with GPT 3.5 almost half a decade ago, and that's when the most violence against its CEO is happening. Even if, somehow, like a video game boss, his murder caused the complete liquidation of OpenAI and disbursement of the proceeds to his murderer, it's doubtful it would put a meaningful dent in the consequences of LLMs in employment and other societal things.
Last week, there was also someone who filmed himself setting fire to a Kimberly Clark warehouse, having been disgruntled over his low pay. He reportedly explicitly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, and I've noticed at least some significant amount of support for him, by the same sorts of people who also lionized Mangione and support the attempts on Altman's life. I don't know where things are going, but I'm pretty sure that more escalation of this type of behavior will lead to nowhere good, triply so for the least well-off parts of society, and I just hope this is a blip instead of a sign of things to come. I'm not sure what else there is to do to stop it other than ramping up law enforcement and making sure that those convicted of such actions get the harshest punishment possible without martyring them. Which doesn't seem like it'd be enough, though.
I'm curious to know more about the shooter/would be arsonist, but this strikes me less as "I have a coherent theory of change" and more as "I am angry about my life and want to get vengeance on Sam Altman."
Sam is by far the highest profile leader of a frontier lab. He also unfortunately also has a bit of that Zuckerberg style alienating personality type; if someone starts waxing philosophical about dominating the light cone, it's going to be Altman. This draws all anti-AI activism toward him, even if it was Claude that took your job, not ChatGPT.
He also lives in a large, nice home in a relatively tony area; Amodei lives in a nondescript house in a shitty neighborhood. Someone fire bombing the latter would create more cognitive dissonance.
https://morenogama.substack.com/p/ai-existential-risk-is-real
This is the substack of the firebomber.
According to whom?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sam-altman-openai-daniel-alejandro-moreno-gama-22201211.php
The San Francisco Chronicle.
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I mean the arsonist is known at this point to be an adherent to the Pause/Stop AI movement, they were active in the Discord and iirc their Instagram bio or handle references Dune’s Butlerian jihad. So I would lean towards that guy having at least directed his outrage in a fairly reasonable fashion given his views. I think he severely overestimated how much his actions will materially work towards his goals.
Even "overestimated" probably overstates things, in that it suggests that he got the magnitude wrong but still got the direction of the effect correct. I suspect it's more likely that stop-AI bombings will have roughly the same effect on AI risk that anarchist groups' bombings and murders a century ago had on government overreach.
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Agreed, this is just impotent rage finding a lightning rod. You can't change society, but you can (attempt to) murder a CEO.
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