Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.
It’s true that in some circumstances we require avoiding even the appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest, but that’s simply too large a burden to impose on everyone all of the time, especially for allegedly dire sins like “having a roommate who works for a Google”
Really Anthropic doesn't seem to be fighting for anyone but a narrow subset of people.
So who cares, none of the but AI providers are particularly ethical. Pick your poison as your conscious and needs allow.
After that, he become well-known to the general public through his Sarah Paine podcasts (which are excellent).
He was first funded by FTX
SBF was in Patel's previous podcast in July 2022 and FTX unraveled in November 2022. Hmm.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sbf
> I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.
And that was right in the middle of FTX being accused by many prominent people .
April 29, 2022 https://x.com/AlderLaneEggs/status/1520023221294145536
June 20, 2022 https://x.com/MartyBent/status/1538645746655936519
This creates a dangerous dynamic. AI can generate targets that a human operator might not be able to justify manually, and when something goes wrong the blame can always be shifted to the system, such as the recent incident where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting.
Israel’s way of fighting this war looks more like pure destruction than a conventional military campaign, and AI systems like this are very easy to abuse in that context. At this point it’s clear that even the U.S. is willing to eliminate targets even when the collateral damage includes the person’s family or neighbors. I don’t think that would have been acceptable in previous administrations. Israel has lowered the bar.
That may be why Anthropic moved early to denounce this kind of usage, even though they had previously partnered with the Department of War.
Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war
https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070
From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see:
“Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”
This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War.
My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position.
Sometimes people succeed without earning it, and what matters is what they do with the success afterwards. I'd say Dwarkesh earned it, but got lucky and caught the right waves, and has surfed the hell out of his success. He's had consistently well informed, level headed takes, and has engaged the field with insight and honest curiousity.
When I see people surf like that, I applaud it. There's nothing grifty or shady, he's just had a great series of excellent opportunities and has played them for everything they're worth. Once he had a few billionaires on, that was all the social cache he needed to continue attracting guests and high level researchers and other figures in AI.
It is not unusual that a young person would succeed at performance occupations. A huge portion of the Top 40 pop songs are performed by people under 27.
SemiAnalysis
https://jon4hotaisle.substack.com/p/influence-as-a-service-s...
Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.