The silence has broken on Peter Thiel’s weird Antichrist lectures, and we’re finally getting some details on how it went. Some people found the lectures dense. Others seem to have found it long-winded and “meandering.” Now, the Washington Post has obtained audio from the whole series and is giving the world a peek inside the stormy mind of the PayPal Mafia godfather. The Post notes that, during his lectures, Thiel specifically zeroed in on people who are critical of technology as likely candidates to be revealed as the coming Dark Lord that his closed-door lectures have centered on. In one particular section of his talks, the billionaire pointed the finger at a well-known leftwing activist, as well as a prominent AI doomsayer. “In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” Thiel said in his Sept. 15 opening talk, according to the recordings. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” Thiel apparently said. It was previously known that Thiel had cast Thunberg as an archetype for the Evil One, but this seems to be the first time that he’s similarly accused “someone like” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent AI “doomer,” of having similar bona fides. For years, Yudkowsky has warned about the dangers of AI development from within the walls of his Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a private non-profit in Berkeley that has published research on the technology’s advancements and its risks. Thiel’s accusation against Yudkowsky is funny because Thiel is, at least partially, responsible for Yudkowsky’s career. Indeed, an excerpt from The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, a new book about the AI industry, claims that two decades ago, the Palantir billionaire helped the AI doomer get his start in the field of artificial intelligence research. It notes: In 2005, Thiel started funding Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute, and the following year they teamed up with Ray Kurzweil—­whose book The Singularity Is Near had become a bestseller—­to create the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. Over the next six years, it expanded to become a prominent forum for futurists, transhumanists, Extropians, AI researchers, and science fiction authors… Yudkowsky has since gone on to become one of the most well-known critics of the development of AI, so maybe he and Thiel—who, these days, could be more aptly described as an “accelerationist”—don’t exactly see eye to eye anymore. Indeed, Yudkowsky is currently promoting his new book on AI, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, whose title is about as doomer as you can get, and he’s basically been saying the same thing for decades. He also recently wrote a screed in The Atlantic, in which he said that humanity should “put a simple stop to the race for superintelligence by international treaty, reining in all the companies simultaneously,” while adding that the “current [AI] technology just does not offer anyone enough control over how a smart AI would turn out.” Yudkowsky depicts AI as an unstoppable force with a will of its own—a kind of Frankensteinian monster that could grow beyond human control. It’s worth noting that this is a somewhat more melodramatic interpretation than the one shared by other AI critics. Indeed, other, less histrionic skeptics prefer to see AI through the “stochastic parrots” paradigm—characterizing it as little more than an advanced form of auto-correct with no intelligence or decision-making capability of its own. Critics, like Timnit Gebru, for instance, have placed a greater emphasis on the risks associated with AI’s immense cost, as well as its detrimental environmental impact, and its potential to crowd out investment in other, potentially more helpful forms of technological development. At any rate, Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost AI doomers, and if he—or someone like him—end up being the Antichrist, Thiel would seem to have no one to blame but himself. Thiel’s visions of the Apocalypse and the person who would hasten it seem—predictably—self-serving. The person who is evil incarnate will, necessarily, threaten Thiel’s business interests, according to him. Meanwhile, the facts of Thiel’s own presence in the world, and how closely it aligns with the traditional conditions that would bring on the Antichrist—that is, a billionaire defense contractor who is helping America’s deep state surveil, catalog, and crack down on the population at home while helping wage wars abroad—seem to be lost on him.