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I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.
There's a lot to unpack here.
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.
While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.
A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.
Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?
Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.
I really don't think this is true. In fact, you don't even remember the year correctly. It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared. The story started to pick up steam with the weird-online-right years later with pizzagate, it became a mainstream right wing talking point during biden but mainstream media continued to mostly avoid it until last year.
Even on google trends you can see that few were interested before he died. Bill Gates for reference.
It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.
Ethics its one of the most bullshit branches of philosophy. All ethics needs to conform to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong and since that's not based on any a priori simple rule system they all need to be malleable enough to be made to conform. Outside of completely irrelevant thought experiments they also all end up being homomorph. How about we pretend they were christian? It says in the book of virtues that rape is bad but you also have to forgive, he paid penance, he shows contrition, Mary Magdalene and shit. There you go.
At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why? Because there are other considerations, more important things. Ethics needs to be flexible, to bend which ever way. This is a good thing actually. The worst people in the world were the ones that took ethics seriously enough to suppress their gut instinct.
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Given Epstein can no longer provide any personal accounts, I'm not sure we can really take much from this. Maybe he was really interested in AI and thus was naturally responsive to funding discussions. Maybe utilitarian AI researchers thought a somewhat disgraced financier was a good target. Maybe he received a normal amount of contacts from AI researchers and if we went through the emails of all the big VCs and private investors we'd find a similar number of emails from AI people.
I'm sure we have a fair few people here who have done the start-up funding gamut and could say the same, but for me getting the attention of potential funders is a pure numbers game (it's apparently much easier in the US compared to my experience in the UK, but still). There are only a small number of rich people and VCs, and a very large number of potential funding projects. You'll do anything to get a call back or a bit of interest. Some Epstein guy sends you an email? Get in, and he's rich. GoGoGo. It's only later you might bother to look into him.
Not sure on this. It could be, but it doesn't feel nearly salacious enough. I'd imagine it's much more likely that muckrackers are looking in general for pieces like this on the major AI founders and this was one of the more interesting, and publishable tidbits, as opposed to something targeted.
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If Dario's wife was asking him for funding because 'AI justifies anything', she would presumably have asked for AI funding rather than trying to fundraise for a completely different company. Meanwhile Eliezer Yudkowsky is connected to Epstein because he accepted a phone call during a MIRI fundraiser...and then they turned down his $300,000 donation offer after doing due diligence. Here is a comment from him describing the interaction:
So the only example in your list of people of Epstein funding AI is the money he gave to MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab, which is connected to academic AI research but not to internet-rationalism or effective altruism. Also I suspect their policies towards accepting donations has much more to do with MIT-wide policies than anything to do with AI specifically. The only internet-rationalist organization is also the one that got a donation offer and turned it down. Rather than anything to do with rationalism, EA, or utilitarianism, I think this just reflects AI being one of the fields that Epstein thought was cool.
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They probably chose it. So what? Here's what was in the media at the time:
Why is it an invalid opinion that Epstein didn't know the girl was under 18? Why should polyamorist AI researchers care that he had a litany of young women in his mansion? Why would it be anybody's duty to not socialize with him after he's out of jail and served his time?
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You’re telling me that having a low Epstein number isn’t all that exclusive a club?
These files follow the same statistical rules as Scott’s classic post about Atlantis. The central example of “links to Epstein” is somebody who went to his creepy island and spent time with some teenage girls. The more you expand that definition, the more people are going to fit into it, but the less meaningful it gets. Marrying someone who once pitched him a business opportunity is a much wider circle.
I think your last point is right. This is at the intersection of several cultural bubbles, which elevates it from trivial to gossip-worthy. Don’t draw too many conclusions from it, you know?
After running those searches, my main takeaways were:
At some point if you want to play six degrees of separation, why don’t you just throw in Jimmy Hoffa and the Pope while you’re at it? I mean what’s the point of all this to say? Elites rub shoulders with elites? The implication being there’s a super secret underground cabal of pedo’s who enslave children with AI and flock cameras? At least for the time being, we can say that ended with Epstein until they find the next pedo ring somewhere. I don’t get how people get caught up in this stuff. I’m something of a believer in the concept of “guilt by association” too, but even then it doesn’t always mean just because I sent someone an email or stood with them in the same room that it’s evidence of a crime.
How does that follow?
What you are describing is an organized criminal conspiracy of which two members were arrested. If that is a correct description, what happened to the other members?
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I haven't been around here consistently over the past few years, so I'm not certain what the average opinion on the Epstein files is on TheMotte. For myself, I follow Michael Tracey Thought on this: basically, it was a total non-event that only had legs because of the ideological ammo it gave to both right and left wing conspiracy theorists. Epstein was a creepy guy, but he was nowhere near the monster people have made him out to be.
The AI-Epstein connections you listed are either irrelevant or barely there. Yud is the only real connection, and no one with any power in the labs even listens to him, though of course he's influential on some of the rank and file, and everyone's heard of him. It doesn't appear that he had any direct connection to any of the leaders of the big three. Dario's wife is just another hustler who was pitching anyone she could; doesn't mean anything to me.
I point towards a recent badly phrased post I made.
The energy against the target (in this case Epstein) isn't because of the target. It is just because they were the first to be uncovered.
Energy gets built up in a subconcious societal consensus that something wrong is happening. When society finds evidence that they were right, then all of that pressure is unleashed on the unlucky first stumbler.
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I specifically call this out.
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Wait, are they? Minsky and Bach are basically totally irrelevant. In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published. Musk and Chomsky are not even AI researchers. Of the people you listed, only Yudkowsky is even associated with rationalism or EA, and he's really not much of an AI researcher either.
It would seem the demand for rationalist EA AI researchers in the Epstein files outstrips the supply.
This is especially amusing in the context of Eliezer "Bomb the Datacenters" Yudkowsky being the only rationalist listed.
I'm a little baffled that you claim the guys famous for autistically writing out detailed models to make predictions ignore second order effects. I'm not trying to get in an argument over whether the models are good, but the point is they certainly don't ignore second order effects and it's quite easy to slot them into a utilitarian framework.
Pre-Transformer AI research had a very distinctive vibe. Chūnibyō is the word that comes to mind. It was essentially a pseudoscience, laundered behind scraps of legitimate science. A typical AI researcher would manage to get one thing working, and then spend the rest of his career extrapolating that into a vast overarching worldview that encompassed all aspects of psychology, ethics, futurology, metaphysics, etc. These experts would maintain some credibility from success in their narrow technical field, but all the other speculative stuff was really little better than the mad ravings of the contemporary "quantum crystal mystic" crowd.
This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein. His interest in science wasn't in incremental improvements, or even just making money, but in total world-shaking, paradigm-shifting, mind-blowing stuff. (This also explains his interest in genetics and biology.)
The rationalist/EA/utilitarian milieu is kind of descended from this (via the Extropian/Singularitarian movement), but it's not the same thing. Epstein would've had little interest in mosquito nets or shrimp welfare, for example.
I object to your pre-Transformer AI research description. There's a grain of truth in it, but it's better described as a kind of grad student descent than mysticism. People saw these kinds of systems could do very weird and surprisingly things; how do we put it together in a useful way? Try various permutations, loop repeatedly, get marginally better. And vision and NL both had achieved meaningful commercial success before AIAYN: there's a reason Google was already dumping billions of dollars into DL research at that point.
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Maybe Pre-Neural Net AI research. Again depends on where you draw the line on what is "AI", before I get into another conversation with the other AI researcher here. But Machine Learning is entirely considered under the "AI" umbrella and has for a long time, at least a decade and half pre-transformer. Charitably you are describing the Minsky-esque AI researchers who were big into Symbolic AI which was a thing in the 70s-80s, ie almost 3 decades before the transformer.
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I hadn't considered it from that angle. I could see how that would create a self-reinforcing loop in the research community.
Guy says lofty things --> Some dude named Jeff shows up and showers him with money.
A lot of rationally self interested people would, at that point, start considering if they should wax philosophical.
Suppose that’s how it actually went. Is there no money dirty enough for you to take? If it turns out I took money from someone in an exchange that he robbed someone else for to pay me, does that make me complicit in the crime? In the court of public opinion that’s fertile ground for every rumor out there. I’m already guilty, no matter what I say; even if I had to knowledge of what the other party was up to. But if you did know and you chose to accept the money anyway and that’s the full extent of your involvement, how guilty are you?
I've only been in a situation where it came up once in my life. I was working for a caterer when a local pillar of the community and upstanding businessman hired the company for a private event. The guy had a reputation for getting handsy with the help. He specifically wanted to hand-pick "the girls" who would be on the floor. I, along with several other members of the crew, refused to work the job. We all got fired for it.
It sucked living on potatoes and cabbage for a month, but I'd do it again.
I think there’s a difference in kind with your case, but I agree with your experience and the actions you took. But implicit in that is the simple reality that if I look through my wallet and count the money I have, at some point and with no doubt, that money has passed through the hands of drug dealers, wife beaters, probably murderers and who knows who else. If someone then comes along and wants to start connecting dots, it would be trivially easy to throw dirt on my name and reputation. It reminds me of the Maddox comic several years ago.
You know, I always thought there was something off about that @Tretiak guy...
… 😤.
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I think you are correct.
I would love to get Epsteins ability to get random super successful people to email me back. Maybe this is just a part of the maxim that no publicity is bad publicity and everyone assumed he got away with pedophilia because he was a highly connected guy. If your rumored to be Mossads number 1 spy then I guess I should return your emails?
In the academic/philanthropic space here I think it might be sufficient to just have money. Full professors at research institutions are, from having talked with several, largely focused on raising money to pay for grad students and postdocs to do the real work (and a large fraction for university overhead). Other university leadership is looking to put names on new buildings or departments. The startup/VC ecosystem seems largely similar, where I've seen founders stoop to surprising levels in the interest of closing a funding round, and only later go on to great success. These people aren't fools, but having it known that there are nine or more digits in your bank account makes them take you seriously, laugh at your dumb jokes, and tell you how great your ideas are. The comparisons to, uh, escorts write themselves.
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Known philanthropists can get academics and other people whose work is funded by similar patronage-begging to email them back for the obvious reasons. In addition, Minsky and Bach were affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, whose director Joi Ito was deeply committed to keeping the Epsteinbucks flowing to the point where (assuming the information about Neri Oxman which became public during the epic Ackman-Big Academia social media feud is roughly correct) being willing to put on dog-and-pony shows for Epstein was a condition of continued employment.
Chomsky is a piece of shit who didn't do anything for Epstein that he wouldn't have done for Pol Pot, of course.
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My understanding is that Maxwell was mossad's number one spy, and Epstein was mossad's number one receptionist for mossad's number one spy.
Robert Maxwell was deeply involved with the Israeli deep state, but the dates don't line up for him to have recruited Epstein. Mossad membership is not hereditary, and nothing apart from her parentage points to Ghislaine being Mossad. If she was, she wouldn't have been senior enough to be Epstein's handler (in any case, as a diaspora Jew who never lived in Israel she would not have been eligible for the required Israeli security clearance). Plus there are plenty of other Israeli figures in the Epstein files, up to and including former Prime Minister Ehud Barack, who could have recruited and/or handled Epstein, if he was in fact Mossad.
I find Epstein being Mossad plausible, but on balance less likely than not because I think Mossad would have tried to cover up the sex crimes if he was their top asset. I don't find either Maxwell being responsible plausible.
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup" would have applied here, no? The sex crimes were too numerous to cover up entirely, and any half-successful attempt at a cover-up would have required a bunch of meddling that would have made "but his partner's dad!" look like a lot more than a conspiracy theory.
Plus don't forget the distinction between "asset" and "agent". Epstein being a Mossad agent seems implausible to me, but any major spy agency to whom he wasn't an asset should be ashamed of that. There's a publicly-known creep who's hosted ex-Presidents and future-Presidents and ex-prime-ministers and princes and billionaires and physics geniuses and so on and so on, and you couldn't even get your hands on copies of a few of his incriminating video discs before they mysteriously disappeared? What are you even getting paid for?
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What exactly does "being Mossad" entail? Some people seem to imagine that you have to go through an initiation theory in a dark cellar with guys in robes chanting and skull lanterns and everything, while a weaker version at least involves an explicit interview and training or being told that you are working for Israel and are to make periodic reports on some burner phone in return for a paycheck turning up under your garbage bin. I could see many instances being much more tacit, though: at some point you are made to realise that you dodged a legal or reputational bullet in ways that seem to be more unlikely than regular luck, and then a friend of a friend asks to have a chat and strongly hints that it really was not luck after all and maybe you can casually tell him your best gossip about how much Prince Andrew enjoyed himself on your island.
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Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published. I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?
That would follow from Minsky dying before the paper was published, unless the Epstein files were of an entirely different communication medium.
The thrust is that minsky and Bach are nobodies, irrelevant to where things stand today; Minsky didn't even believe that you can just train AI massive amounts of data to build intelligence until his death. The only relevant AI researcher listed is Yud, everyone else is a literally who. Does one guy count as over representation? You be the judge.
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