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 charged.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Government regulation as well as partisan regulators aligned with Anthropic and OpenAI would be huge obstacles for smaller companies — or those who don’t adhere to the same philosophy.
“The AI CEOs can only do so much,” Verdon said, describing Anthropic CEO Amodei as “a very thoughtful guy.”
“I don’t think they’re necessarily bad people,” he said of people he knows at the company. “I think they are just so deep in this ideology they can’t see clearly.”
President Trump and senior government officials have rejected calls for new guardrails for AI companies, telling them there is nothing stopping them from regulating themselves.
The public remains uneasy. A Pew Research Center survey of 3,488 adults in June found 52% were more concerned than excited about AI’s growing role in daily life.
Verdon says his Effective Accelerationism movement is completely decentralized. Its zeal for rapid technological progress has found a champion in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
“We don’t have billions of dollars of shadow funding trying to influence things,” Verdon said, tongue-in-cheek. He advocates for more competition, more open-source AI models and freedom to build.
His startup, Extropic, is developing energy-efficient computing chips. In July the company announced a nonbinding letter of intent for up to $75 million in Commerce Department funding.
Not every builder is sold. Bojan Tunguz, a data scientist and founder of Tampa-area startup TabulAI, calls himself “adjacent” to e/acc.
“I don’t believe that acceleration at any cost is an absolute good,” he told The Post. “I do think that some cap might be necessary at some point and some pacing might be justifiable.”
Noting the rapid pace of growth, he said today’s AI tools already let him build things that were not possible “even six months ago.”
He welcomes open models as a reliable fallback if big labs restrict access to their tools. But he rejects the idea cornering the market is their motive.
Asked about Verdon’s “mind virus” claims, Tunguz took a broader view.
“I think we all have our own mind viruses — our own perspectives, our own favorite worldviews,” he said. “I think we are all to some extent accelerationists. The question is just how far.”
