New Yorker excerpt: Brockman kept asking 'how do we win?' when pitched 2017 AI safety coalition
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-10-16
- benjtodd shares a New Yorker excerpt: "People give Sama a lot of shit, but forget about Brockman."
- In 2017, Dario Amodei hired former public-interest lawyer Page Hedley as OpenAI's policy and ethics adviser, who proposed an AI lab coalition coordinating with a NATO-like international body to avert a "catastrophic" arms race.
- Per Hedley, OpenAI president Greg Brockman couldn't see how this helped beat competitors: "No matter what I said, Greg kept going back to 'So how do we raise more money? How do we win?'"
- The excerpt serves as historical counterpoint to Scott Alexander's "AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot" argument.
Related event: New Yorker reveal: Brockman asked only "how do we win" on safety(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Hinton accuses Jensen Huang of downplaying AI risks to sell more chips; Huang calls Hinton a fearmonger — notkilleveryoneist · 2026-10-16
- DSPy Author's $70 O'Reilly Book Rejected by Engineer Who Now Just Tells Claude What to Do — lateinteraction · 2026-10-16
- 'A machine proving new math, a car driving up a wall': AI researcher on how weird it's getting — rand_longevity · 2026-10-16
- Yacine on training: 'Neural nets are lazy stupid idiots — I build hells to make them ubermensch' — yacineMTB · 2026-10-16
- Jeff Clune: Moving the Goalposts Will Be Humanity's Last Job — jeffclune · 2026-10-16
- Replit CEO Amjad Masad Says the Future of Work Is the 'Self-Driving Company' — TechCrunch AI · 2026-10-16