Jaan Tallinn

Demis Hassabis, chief scientist at Alphabet, has, quote, long hired people aligned with the movement, unquote, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Billionaire developer of Skype and early anthropic investor Jan Talin has been a major funder of EA Causes.

How much money from the AI boom will flow into EA Causes? Stripe executive Nan Ronsahoff writes that the seven founders of Anthropic have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, which at its hoped-for valuation of $2 trillion would be $90 billion.

Given that EA skews to data-driven global philanthropy, you could argue that Bill Gates is an effective altruist and that the giving pledge should appeal to these billionaires in the making.

You know, there's Dustin Moskovitz, the, the, uh, Facebook co-founder who's very much a part of this, funds a lot of EA long-termist, transhumanist kind of stuff.

Uh, there's Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, who has given a ton of money to a, a whole bunch of different organizations that have people going back and forth between Anthropic and these organizations and so on.

So it is this incestuous tangle of connections between thousands of organizations, the AI companies, and super, super wealthy tech titans.

And so, you know, you, you think, like, it surely can't be the case that, like, the, the super elites are up there and they all know each other and they-- there, there's this cabal and these, like, secret meetings that they have where they're like, you know, smoking cigars, like twiddling their, their fingers or thumbs or whatever.

It's not funny, but it's meant to be funny.

But the reason this makes me really angry is because both Dave and Drew send me down a rabbit hole on this whole AI scare, right? So for two weeks, I ended up digging into where this is coming from, and it turns out it's coming from two billionaires who are heavily invested in OpenAI and Anthropic, Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn.

And essentially, it is a complete hoax in order to create what's called a regulatory moat, right? To keep up-and-comers out, and to create a bar so people like us cannot use free AI models

modelsAnd the long story short is, they're gonna have a complete and total monopoly on AI.

Now, go back to the companies.

When Anthropic was getting off the ground, its first big round, a hundred and twenty-four million dollars, was led by Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder and one of this movement's best-known donors.

Its second round, five hundred and eighty, five hundred and eighty million dollars was led by, yeah, Sam Bankman-Fried, that guy, the courtroom guy.

Today, the chief of staff to Amodei at An- Anthropic is a woman named Avital Balwit, who, according to Bloomberg, is the one person at the company who reports directly to him.

But you also have a number of other, like, tech billionaires.

Um, Jaan Tallinn, who is the co-founder of Skype.

Elon Musk has given to some of these causes.

Vitalik Buterin, um, the c- the co-founder of Ethereum, the cryptocurrency, but he-

Um, one of the things that I think people do not realize is that, um, the AI industry is using the exact same playbook from the tobacco and fossil fuel industry.

So for instance, uh, Bernie Sanders, um, has this alliance with Steve Bannon, um, is very closely working with the Future of Life Institute, which was co-founded by billionaire Jaan Tallinn, um, the same billionaire Jaan Tallinn who's a leading investor in Anthropic's Series A.

He l- he led Anthropic's Series A. It's also the same billionaire Jaan Tallinn who, um, invests in, uh, invested in, uh, a so-called auditing, third-party auditing organization that claims to audit Anthropic's, uh, models.

So this whole g- rogue models, you know, agents creating civilizations and all of that lingo came from this very pseudoscientific, um, uh, audit that, that is by a, a- an organization that claims to be a third party, but in fact isn't, because you see it's the same investors, the same staff, the same people.

So to the public, it seems like there's a whole bunch of independent experts coming together warning about these existential risks.