How Peter Thiel's Relationship With Eliezer Yudkowsky Launched the AI Revolution

ai-historyopenaideepmindrationalismai-safetyeffective-altruism

Abstraction: Thiel-Yudkowsky-Altman network origins of DeepMind and OpenAI

Key points:

Eliezer Yudkowsky introduced Shane Legg to superintelligence ideas via the Extropian community; Legg co-founded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman; Peter Thiel invested $2.25M as DeepMind's first major backer after meeting Hassabis at the 2010 Singularity Summit
Yudkowsky founded the Singularity Institute for AI in 2000 (funded by Brian and Sabine Atkins) as a pro-acceleration project, then pivoted to AI safety within 8 months after concluding beneficial superintelligence was not automatic
Thiel's discussions with Altman about DeepMind's progress helped inspire Altman's February 2014 blog post on AI and ultimately the co-founding of OpenAI as a nonprofit counterweight to Google/DeepMind
Yudkowsky's rationalism framework and LessWrong blog were widely read inside OpenAI (Greg Brockman ran a LessWrong reading group while at Stripe)
Thiel warned Altman days before the November 2023 board ouster: "You don't understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe this stuff" — and felt partial guilt for having funded Yudkowsky's influence

Connections: Peter Thiel · Eliezer Yudkowsky · Sam Altman · Openai · Deepmind · AI Safety · Artificial General Intelligence