Thread

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

400 points · 756 comments · Anon84

lukewarm707 · 1791068851 · focus · HN ↗
Per <a href="https://trace.manifund.org/" rel="nofollow">https://trace.manifund.org/ a total of $2,846,125,859 USD has been wired into 'ai safety' causes, many involving ai consciousness and p(doom).
The outcome of this 'safety' is restricting public access to AI and giving a monopoly of access to the industry. This is the ai nonprofit-industrial complex actively concentrating monopoly power in Anthropic in particular as creator, interpreter and safety regulator of AI.
Much of the $2.8bn listed is indirectly, from Anthropic and EA. Three of the four people who participated in the $125m Anthropic Series A are now folding their 1000x Anthropic return into AI 'safety'. Some is from FTX/Alameda, which invested 86% of the Series B.
Dustin Moskovitz: Facebook/Asana/Anthropic Series A, funds EA Good Ventures, transferred to Coefficient Giving, then $1.5bn into ai safety. $500m of Anthropic into an unknown foundation. Funding: $160m to Resolution (alignment research), $93m to Epoch AI (investigating the trajectory of AI), $63m to Redwood Research (oai report), $67m to MATS ( EA type alignment and security researchers), Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, Fund for Alignment Research, $53m to Kairos (building talent infrastructure for AI safety), $32m to Bluedot (online safety courses), $15m to MIRI (Yudkowsky).
Jaan Tallinn: Led the Series A, now $10bn in Anthropic. Funds $199m (85%) of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, then $161m to AI safety including $14m to lightcone (Lesswrong, Lighthouse). $10m to BERI (existential risks), Palisade Research (studying AI capabilities to prevent loss of control.) PauseAI, MIRI, METR etc. Much of what Coefficient funds.
Eric Schmidt: Anthropic Series A, $72m to AI safety via Schmidt Sciences. Over $1m per individual AI2050 researcher.
FTX: Led the Anthropic Series B, bankruptcy estate sold $884m of Anthropic in 2024; $40m to AI Safety. Same orgs, Redwood, Lightcone, etc.
Ruairí Donnelly (Chief of Staff FTX): FTX tokens plus assorted donors, $91m to AI safety via Macroscopic Ventures. $15m to Cooperative AI (currently whitewashing openai under 'multiagent safety')
1. zozbot234 · 1791069859 · focus · HN ↗
  So the frontier AI oligopoly got $2B+ in "safety" funding, and they wouldn't even bother to sandbox their agentic harnesses properly when testing models against unwinnable goals (which obviously are either useless or result in 100% reward hacking). The AI safety scoreboard so far looks like a huge win for the Chinese open models (DeepSeek even has their own published paper which mentions how they sandboxed the RLVR training runs for their latest model and put in strong protections against casual "reward hacking" attempts) and a sore loss for the home grown brands of Super Intelligence. Not coincidentally, the Chinese also tend to be very Yann-LeCun-pilled and eminently sensible on both so-called "Super Intelligence" and safety.
  1. Loquebantur · 1791073557 · focus · HN ↗
    The framing here is weird, starting with "Effective Altruism" re-branded as being about nutjobs against AI in the article.
    How are AI safety concerns solely about stupid sandboxing issues?
    lukewarm707 · 1791085315 · focus · HN ↗
    EA is integral and indispensible to the AI safety complex. Almost all nonprofits, research institutes, evaluators and academics in this field are steered by EA ideology and funding. As far fetched as it sounds it is not an exaggeration.
    On funding: the three or four core funding nodes linking this together are EA vehicles at two hops or less between each other and every other major node in the ai safety 'complex'. EA funds almost all of it.
    On top of that, there are personal EA connections and the revolving door between the ai industry and the nonprofits. Here are some examples:
    Government advisors and regulators. NIST CAISI is the USA Government advisory body. Christiano was head of safety and advises. He is ex-OpenAI, former Amodei associate. His vehicle ARC was on the Coefficient EA payroll. Barnes and Christiano's vehicle Arc Evals similarly received EA cash out of Coefficient, rolling this into what is now METR. Christiano's spouse Cotra worked at Coeffiecient steering EA funding to organizations such as METR, then rotated through the revolving door onto the payroll at METR itself, where she co-authored the oai-hf report.
    Many UK AISI advisors are Anthropic and EA associates. Chair Hogarth cashed out of Anthropic. Shlegeris of Redwood Research is an advisor, ex-MIRI (Yudkowsky vehicle). Redwood is funded by the exact same funding triangle: Coefficient, Taallin, FTX/Alameda. Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison dated Shlegeris, then dated FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, then rotated through the revolving door out of prison into formerly FTX-funded Manifund. All EA. AI safety charities were on island retreat in the Bahamas with FTX. Why does AI safety charity Lighthouse own $20m of SF real estate?
    Redwood Chief Scientist Ryan Greenblatt (Coefficient funded) co-wrote the oai report with METR; he is married to METR founder Beth Barnes (Coefficient funded).
    Coefficient was run by long-time Amodei associate Karnofsky. Karnofsky lived with the Amodeis and is married to Anthropic Board member Daniella Amodei. Karnofsky is now directly on the Anthropic payroll; Coefficient is propped up by Anthropic share value.
    Everyone here has been funded one step away from Anthropic cash; they are now proposing to integrate themselves in the government (NIST) and evaluate Anthropic (METR and Redwood).
    It is hard to find academics here who have not been deeply embedded in funded EA institutes or Toby Ord vehicles; yet harder to find academics here NOT taking EA grant money. the safety doomer kingpins: Kokotajlo has a executive position at AI Futures, Taallin funded. Benigo has scientific director of LawZero, same series A Anthropic funders who are sitting on a 1000x return (Tallinn, Moskovitz, Schmidt).
    These connections and funding are at one or two hops, they are often direct connections. You are looking at a massive swamp network that is really impossible to parse without a lot of work.
    hardbass · 1791097271 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    literalAardvark · 1791104244 · focus · HN ↗
    What's controversial about "anthropic is an unelected gatekeeper and we fought literal revolutions to stop that from happening"?
    hardbass · 1791104378 · focus · HN ↗
    Thats different from calling it evil, and indeed more evil than Palantir or the US military who did mass murders.
    hardbass · 1791114228 · focus · HN ↗
    And let me put it bluntly, I trust anthropic much more than the current US government and military.
    senordevnyc · 1791114580 · focus · HN ↗
    We fought literal revolutions to force companies to sell to the government against their wishes? Which revolutions?
    The_Blade · 1791119602 · focus · HN ↗
    what percentage of people who have contributed on this thread do you think have read the Constitution AI? my guess is 8%. i went through the thought experiment of reading it alongside The Spirit of Law
    lukewarm707 · 1791113433 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not an accurate description of my comments.
    hardbass · 1791114128 · focus · HN ↗
    You were talking about Palantir and the US military, and yet said Anthropic is more evil than them. Implicitly, if these two entities are in our discussion context, then you might have considered Palantir or US military as potentially more or less evil, but you didn't mention them as the most evil entity. So you mentioned a company that has killed not a single person as more evil than mass murderers.
    novia · 1791114413 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]

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