Lots of the claims about Gwern in the intro are exaggerated.
Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work.
He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle.
By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs.
People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview.
It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.
"Wordcel" is roon terminology, right? I highly doubt Aschenbrenner is an EA, and if he's a "wordcel" he somehow managed to do mathematical economics without too much problem.
Gwern's probably not a "wordcel" either, he can program, right? I've never seen any of his publications though.
It's called Situational Awareness too, not "Situation Report", and Yudkowsky said he didn't like it. Not that Yudkowsky is an EA either.
I think the situation is more complex than you think it is, or at least more complex than you're pretending.
Edit: oh, you're saying Gwern is an EA too? Do you have a source for that?
Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work.
He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle.
By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs.
People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview.
It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.
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