Reposted by E.J. Fagan
E.J. Fagan
@ejfagan.com
4.7K followers 1.7K following 2.9K posts
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois Chicago. Author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics. Also, baseball.
![I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems.
Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAl and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document.
thave no
history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink.
I am not writing this on the behalf of any interest group. Historically, much of OpenAl-adjacent shenanigans has been blamed on groups with weaker PR teams, like Effective Altruism and rationalists. I actually feel bad for the latter two groups for taking so many undeserved hits. There are good and bad apples in every faction. There are so many brilliant, kind, amazing people at OpenAl, and there are so many brilliant, kind, and amazing people in Anthropic/EA/Google/[insert whatever group]. I'm agnostic. My one loyalty is to the respect and dignity of human life.
I'm not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAl. I just observed the surrounding Al culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned. It's likely these problems are not really on OpenAl but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley. I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn't.
I will not pretend that my time among these circles didn't do damage. I wish that 55% of my brain was not devoted to strategizing about the survival of me and of my friends. I would like to devote my brain completely and totally to Al research finding the first principles of visual circuits, and collecting maximally activating images of CLIP SAEs to send to my collaborators for publication.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qiknc4t5rq7yngvz7g4aezq7/bafkreif3sd7j56vpzwzakjpqwnd5zvtkcxv4ljfvgggt6y5e7p5qtunuh4)
