New Yorker doc follows OpenAI researcher Dan Selsam debating AI's future with friends

connoraxiotes · x · 2026-09-25

• The New Yorker released a short documentary, "Josh's Wedding" (dir. Brent Katz), set at an April 2022 wedding where longtime OpenAI researcher Daniel Selsam showed code-davinci-002 to his high-school friends, including comedy writer Simon Rich, stunning them with a poem and sparking debate over AI's promise and peril.
• The reposter notes Selsam isn't a doomer, but represents researchers recently growing worried about AI; Selsam previously warned we're losing the ability to evaluate AI just as humans offload more thinking than ever.
• Quoted context includes Selsam's public personal statement on AI risk, citing his 15+ years across paradigms: probabilistic programming at MIT, early Lean theorem prover work at MSR, neural reasoning research at Stanford, and chain-of-thought optimization at OpenAI since 2022.

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