Julia Bossmann

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties— During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly. It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims. However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry. I don't think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people. There is nothing wrong imo with sex parties and heavy LSD use in theory, but combined with the shadow of 100B+ interest groups, leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen. The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety. Women are like canaries in the coal mine. They are often the first to realize that something has gone horribly wrong, and to smell the cultural carbon monoxide in the air. For many women, Silicon Valley can be like Westworld, where violence is pay-to-pay. I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems. Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink. I am not writing this on the behalf of any interest group. Historically, much of OpenAI-adjacent shenanigans has been blamed on groups with weaker PR teams, like Effective Altruism and rationalists. I actually feel bad for the latter two groups for taking so many undeserved hits. There are good and bad apples in every faction. There are so many brilliant, kind, amazing people at OpenAI, and there are so many brilliant, kind, and amazing people in Anthropic/EA/Google/[insert whatever group]. I’m agnostic. My one loyalty is to the respect and dignity of human life. I'm not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI. I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned. It’s likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley. I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn’t. I will not pretend that my time among these circles didn’t do damage. I wish that 55% of my brain was not devoted to strategizing about the survival of me and of my friends. I would like to devote my brain completely and totally to AI research— finding the first principles of visual circuits, and collecting maximally activating images of CLIP SAEs to send to my collaborators for publication.

Join our Scaling, Alignment & Open-Source AI workshop Fri, Dec 15 in New Orleans or remotely! 📷shorturl.at/RXZ16 Hear Nick Bostrom @ylecun @tegmark @percyliang @JJitsev and other panelists discuss the Open Source and the Future of AI, and engage in discussions on new scaling laws, "emergent" behaviors, continued pretraining, multimodal alignment, compression & fast inference, time-series foundation models and open generalist agents, and recent supercomputing efforts (Trillion Parameter Consortium) and more! Join us for the Open Source AI party sponsored by @cerebras, @togethercompute and @UMontreal's CERC-AAI Lab led by @irinarish!

I thought @elonmusk’s interview with @andrewrsorkin was one of the great interviews ever. Musk is a free speech absolutist which I respect. I think he is entirely correct that he and @X are treated unfairly and inconsistently by advertisers. @tiktok_us @instagram @facebook and others have enormous amounts of problematic content, antisemitic and otherwise, but the advertisers don’t boycott those platforms. Musk is targeted because the other media organizations view @X as a competitor and any time his name is in an article about controversies, it draws clicks. MSM is incentivized to attack him as it actually drives attention to their sites and therefore more revenues. It is these attack articles by other media organizations that put pressure on the @Disney’s of the world to stop advertising on X. If Bob Iger would carefully examine the facts, he would likely continue to advertise on X, but Disney caves to public pressure rather than do the right thing. Meanwhile Disney invests heavily on TikTok, likely alongside videos of kids teaching other teenagers to be anorexic and worse. I am sure Nelson Peltz can fix this when he joins the Disney board. X presents the opportunity for advertisers to access an incredible global audience that is not available elsewhere. And it is cheap compared to other alternatives because of current circumstances. On Musk and antisemitism: After examining the facts, it was clear to me that Musk did not have antisemitic intent when he responded with the ‘actual truth’ tweet, and further clarified thereafter. I thought he made what he meant extremely clear in the @andrewrsorkin interview, namely, that Jews are drawn to support ‘oppressed’ groups and causes through various non-profits due to our history of being an oppressed minority. Musk points out correctly that a number of these organizations and their members support Hamas. And he is correct in saying that Jews should rethink support for organizations that seek their elimination. Many Jews are doing that right now. To use a Muskism, Earth is fortunate that @X is owned by an individual that is largely insulated from financial and other influence. That said, perhaps some form of very carefully governed trust would be a better forever owner than any individual. @PershingSqFdn invested in the Twitter privatization in support of free speech. Whether we make a profit on our investment is not important to us as we never intend to sell our interest. I am more inclined to like and support companies that advertise on the platform because I appreciate their support for free speech. I have actually bought products I learned about from ads on @X. I can’t think of another example of my responding to direct advertising other than on X. Unfortunately, recent (and society’s long-term experience) with non-profit governance, see @OpenAI, certain private universities etc. should not give anyone confidence that a traditional non-profit would be a better owner of X than Musk. Perhaps some day the ownership of X should be distributed to each American, one share for each American during their lives and one for each person born, with a charter which permanently vests the free speech principles by which it operates. Until then, we all should be grateful that X is owned by Musk.

Effective Altruism— the movement dedicated to doing good better— has been under scrutiny since the fall of SBF. But seven women told me that EA also has a hostile culture for women, one in which sexual misconduct is tolerated or rationalized away. time.com/6252617/effective-a…