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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.
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.
I have a few AI books from that era that I've been meaning to flip through again just to get a kick out of the huge vibe shift in the field. When I remember acquiring them 15-20 years ago, it seemed it was all attempts to create bespoke approaches to each aspect of the human experience. Hand-coded language models ("verb", "subject", "object"), visual edge detection, spectrograms for speech recognition, physical world models, and so forth. Nowadays, "lolz, just throw data and compute at it" seems the preferred approach.
To be fair, the limitations of the bespoke methods were known at the time: different words can serve different roles in different contexts. Sometimes we noun verbs and verb nouns. And so on for the other spaces.
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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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