❤️ I love you all (except for you)
A deepening ideological schism in Silicon Valley underpins the fight over OpenAI's future.
It's surprising how many times a big international tech story breaks and there's an Australian in the thick of it. That has been the case again this week during the battle playing out in Silicon Valley over the future of OpenAI, the global market leader in artificial intelligence.
Beneath that fight lies an ideological split between two philosophies sweeping through the tech sector, with effective altruism (EA) on one side and effective acceleration (e/acc) on the other. Hat tip to Crikey for discovering that OpenAI board member and effective altruist Helen Toner is actually a former student at Melbourne Girls Grammar. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both since reported that Toner was at the centre of a spat that may go some way towards explaining the tumultuous events since the weekend which began with Sam Altman's firing.
According to these reports, Altman had been in serious dispute with Toner over an academic paper she had written that he believed criticised OpenAI while being generous to its competitor, Google-backed Anthropic. Altman had pushed for Toner to step down from the board, the board chose a different path and the rest is (fast moving and rapidly unfolding) history. Interestingly, the CEO the OpenAI board chose, Emmett Shear, has ties to Anthropic where he consulted.
Toner is an advocate of effective altruism, which was most famously advocated by fallen crypto golden boy Sam Bankman-Fried. Effective altruism emerged over a decade ago led by the likes of Australian philosopher Peter Singer. The philosophy centres on identifying the world’s most pressing problems and the finding best solutions to them. It took hold in tech amid the rise of artificial intelligence and its potentially catastrophic consequences, with a belief in the movement that AI advances should benefit all humanity.
