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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

Why is all this drama coming only from the American companies?

It's mostly coming from two out of many American companies that happen to have the highest concentration of people from a very specific movement born in California long before the current AI wave. In fact Anthropic's entire internal culture was built around their views. The fact they operate massive amounts of money doesn't help.

> from a very specific movement born in California long before the current AI wave

Can you be more specific? This is new to me, but I'm not familiar with Californian history.

EA.

After searching the closest I got was "Effective altruism". Is that what you tried to say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

Edit: Another comment suggests Effective accelerationism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

Effective Altruism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

It has some interesting ideas, and also gave us people like Sam Bankman-Fried.

He’s probably referencing effective accelerationism or something associated with the TESCREAL cloud of beliefs

Edit: saw the other responses. I don’t think effective altruism was the right answer. Effective accelerationism, which came out of effective altruism, has all the ideas about human extinction and needing to develop AGI at all costs to save the species insanity.

Effective Altruism. Also the related Bay Area group known as the "rationalists". Effective accelerationism, while seemingly opposed to EA, is in fact the flip side of the same coin. Look up the term TESCREAL.

Members of these groups are deeply embedded and heavily represented within top AI companies. Anthropic is particularly impacted, as its leadership is almost entirely made up of EAs. One of EA's goals has been to get EAs hired at the major AI labs so that they can influence AI's development. If you ever hear people discussing their personal P(doom), you're listening to a discussion topic originated by rationalists.

America is a stage for the world. Nobody knows or cares about drama happening in European tech companies.

I say this neither negatively or positively, it's just that US news is, for now, the only international news, in both tech and politics.

Which is itself a side effect of the US media treating most news as a spectacle, combined with the US (historically, but especially currently) being a phenomenally good place to be incredibly rich because much of the government will in a way that many developed nations would not allow.

Because they have the most advanced models.

They have the most creditors, we’re at the top of the S-Curve, and inference margins have a lot of room to contract (and it’s not obvious that A\ or OAI are competitive against DeepSeek in that domain).

Because Anthropic and OpenAI are the primary drivers of the AI space?

Every company that is not OpenAI or Anthropic is sufficiently behind the frontier to feel ethically shielded from the weight of advancing the frontier.

wow. that's really quite backwards. the more money you raise and the more money you want, the bigger the story you have to tell. apparently after 1T you've got to raise the stakes to extinction level event.

"it's just marketing" cool story bro

Capital concentration, they have access and lots of control over the media, their CEOs made themselves public personalities, they for some reasons decided to cosplay as Bond villains, they are linked to Trump (and lot of people hate Trump). Just a few reasons, I’m sure we can think of more

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