Silicon Valleys AI accelerationists fighting back against mind virus taking over big labs

Physicists are warning against Effective Altruists spreading a “mind virus” over Silicon Valley, promoting a “doomer” view of Artificial Intelligence.Calls to regulate AI have been growing from industry leaders Anthropic and OpenAI, who warn the technology they are building could kill us all.However, those who list themselves as AI accelerationists feel such companies are bluffing in a bid to safeguard the advantages they have gained after spending billions of dollars creating their AI models.“I don’t think AI is going to kill us all.I think that sort of thinking is more dangerous than the AI itself,” Guillaume Verdon, the physicist who founded the Effective Accelerationism movement, told The Post.“If you ask any of these doomers how it’s supposed to kill us all, they can never flesh out all the details … I’m a mathematician.

Show me the math.”Verdon pointed out how the practice of Effective Altruism — a philosophy which believes a certain circle of enlightened people committed to doing the most good are the only ones to be trusted — has “culturally, ideologically compromised all these big labs.”“Someone has to stand up to this complex,” he said, noting he has endured pushback he blames on AI “doomers.”“They think I’m Voldemort,” he added, referring to the Harry Potter villain.“They are obsessed with ‘Harry Potter.’”Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier,” earlier this month urging companies to slow advances in their most powerful systems, embed outside evaluators inside their labs and work with the government on regulation.But Verdon noted the proposed regulators are all friends with the CEOs and higher ups at the biggest AI companies.“They propose the third-party auditors that are all from the same ideological school of thought.

They’re all friends, and there’s a revolving door,” he said.“They’re just gonna be a sort of cartel with fake checks and balances,” he charg...