GoKawiilA 20-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house at 3:45 AM Friday. Then walked three miles to OpenAI headquarters and threatened to burn it down. He has been booked on suspicion of attempted murder.
He was not a lone wolf. He was an active member of PauseAI with six community roles. His Discord handle was "Butlerian Jihadist." His Instagram was a feed of doomer content: capability curves captioned "if we do nothing very soon we will die," Venn diagrams placing us at the intersection of The Matrix, Terminator, and Idiocracy. Four months before the attack, he recommended Yudkowsky and Soares' If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies to his followers.
His name is Daniel Moreno-Gama.
He had his own Substack. In January he published “AI Existential Risk,” estimating the probability of AI-caused extinction as “nearly certain.” He called the technology “an active threat against anyone who is using it and especially towards the people building it.” He concluded: “We must deal with the threat first and ask questions later.” He wrote a poem imagining the children of AI developers dying, asking their parents why they did nothing. “May Hell be kind to such a vile creature,” he wrote about the builders.
PauseAI has already deleted his messages from their Discord.
For an investing newsletter, I know this is not what most of you are here for. The goal here is to to explain where my worldview is coming from, so that the longer term calls start to make more sense. My ideas behind the “New New Deal” are intended as a direct response to where this is going.
All I am doing here is running their model forward, and connecting the dots.
Here is the framework. It has three moving parts.
Start with certainty. Yudkowsky’s position is that if anyone builds sufficiently intelligent AI, every human being on earth dies. Not probably. Not maybe. Everyone. Your children. His daughter Nina, whom he invokes by name. He published this in TIME. He wrote it in a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. He said we should airstrike data centers, and that the risk of nuclear exchange is preferable to a training run completing.
Purity spiral aka escalation. Within this community, members compete to demonstrate commitment by raising the stakes. P(doom) numbers climb from 50% to 90% to 99.99999%. The Center for AI Safety's national spokesperson said on camera that the correct response is to "walk to the labs across the country and burn them down." PauseAI activated something called a "Warning Shot Protocol" declaring an AI model "a weapon of mass destruction." One of PauseAI's leaders said an Anthropic researcher "deserves whatever is coming to her." When someone flagged this rhetoric in PauseAI's Discord, the mods deleted the post.
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