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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 think his gf is far more interesting than the Epstein mild connections. She married a 60 year old at 20. Then later dated 30-year older Eric Schmidt and then somehow ended up with the slightly younger Amodei. I am not going to think she was born with some outstanding ability of seduction at a young age or I assume she could have done better when she was 20. But it’s like once she was the tech slut she got passed around. And they seem to have bad processes for figuring out how to get better girls into their network.
Being able to talk nerdy as a 7+ and/or have both the attraction to engineering types and the ruthlessness is a superpower. Aella discourse same thing
Is it a super power? Mira Murat actually does research and appears to be hot enough to be rich by just being a SAHM. Surely there’s something in between 40+ year old college drop out and Mira Murati quality.
This strikes me as Amdoei and a few other tech guys having a weak mate search function and just going for whatever is readily available. Right time right place. He’s not even bad looking.
Does she? Her first job was PM at Tesla, followed by some startup roles (from memory) before becoming an executive and then CTO. Now she runs her own AI company. That trajectory screams manager/business not AI researcher. Just the kind of area where being a 7+ and able to talk nerdy is super useful. I remember looking at her career path years ago and realizing I could never nepo-baby that hard.
You may be right that she’s more of a manager than pure engineering.
I have no idea though on the nepo-baby comment. No one from Albania comes from much money. But being attractive, social, and a tier 2 mind seems possible. A Dartmouth Engineering degree isn’t easy. Schools like Dartmouth do sometimes push kids to more engineering management than pure engineering.
It's probably not nepotism in the strict definitional sense. But I've almost never heard of someone coming out of undergrad straight into project management at a prestigious company. Let alone from a non top 10 engineering school. Call it connections, familial or platonic. But she got into her positions based on some amount of capability and likely a large amount of "who you know" and was at least capable enough to build on that. But my realization was that technical knowledge and skill and actually attempting to do the work will not get as far as knowing the right people, being able to schmooze, and social climb your way into a prestigious position. Probably a bit of sour grapes.
Zuckerberg, SBF, Chamath. Seems like a lot have done it. In Musks orbit it seems like he does it a lot even with non-attractive people. His Doge choices were young. Nikita Bier at Twitter.
PM roles aren’t pure engineering. Dartmouth outside of HYPS is as prestigious as anywhere and coming from Albania getting into a top school is hard (white and had fewer resources). Albania to Dartmouth Engineering is a strong indicator of ability and agency. Only MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are more prestigious of the engineering schools. If my goal coming from Albania was to get into US tech I would probably rank Dartmouth as my 9th choice after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, University of Chicago, and Colombia. Maybe CMU is better but Dartmouth opens up better trad finance jobs too. And probably about half a dozen schools at the same level. A poor white you would basically choose whichever lets you in and/or consider their aid. Seems a little weird to me to not consider Dartmouth engineering as prestigious enough not to get a foot in the door to perform.
Though she did backdoor Dartmouth thru a guaranteed transfer program, but again she’s essentially poor unconnected white so getting Ivy isn’t easy.
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Know in the Biblical sense, maybe.
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