I spent 2 Days at an AI Doomsday Cult I decided to attend an event where the Effective Altruism & Berkeley Rationalist people spread their AI doomsday narrative. Here is a full write up of the experience, who talked, what they said, and one very fun example of me destroying a kook with a fact bomb. It's pretty critical that we all keep doing work to help the world understand who these people are and that their warnings that everyone is going to die is mostly just some sci fi bullshit from a bunch of nerds with performative autism vibecodeguild.substack.com/p…

A Flock of Altruists - Hit The Breaks Except For Me

This is the full video of my appearance on MTS live yesterday. It’s not my full argument against the AI Doomers at all, that would take an hour or two, but I get into a bunch of it.

People talk about fake news and conspiracies, but Effective Altruism is aggressively placing their agents inside of the mainstream media outlets to control the narrative about AI, and they're not even hiding it. They literally brag about it in public. Do you think China knows they've placed agents in their media as well? I wonder if Trump and Xi talked about an AI Doomsday Cult from Berkeley infiltrating Chinese media or not... How Effective Altruism Infiltrated the Media vibecodeguild.substack.com/p…

Which AI lab is the least infected with Effective Altruism or Berkeley Rationalists? Google? X? Muse?

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews. One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public. Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it. Scoop from @huntryerson 👇

Worth rereading this article in the context of @huntryerson's amazing scoop in @PirateWires that Jacob Coxon lied straight to camera about his PR campaign

I asked ChatGPT to give me a two paragraph summary of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the fan fiction bible of this Berkeley AI doomer cult producing almost all AI safety “research”: Here’s what ChatGPT said: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality could be troubling because it wraps a morally dangerous worldview inside an entertaining, beloved fictional universe: exceptionally intelligent people understand threats that ordinary citizens and institutions cannot, conventional morality may obstruct survival, and deception, manipulation and concentrated power become defensible when extinction is at stake. Although the story warns against arrogance, it repeatedly rewards Harry for believing he is smarter and more responsible than everyone around him—normalizing the idea that a self-appointed intellectual elite should secretly manage society for humanity’s own good. It could therefore function as a recruiting funnel for what critics call an AI doomsday cult. Yudkowsky explicitly described HPMOR as a way to attract talented people to rationalism and AI-alignment work. Readers are invited to identify with a gifted minority that recognizes an approaching catastrophe while the outside world remains blind. Once that identity is accepted, the same framework can facilitate control: urgency discourages reflection, “information hazards” justify secrecy, criticism can be dismissed as irrationality, extraordinary sacrifices become morally necessary, and membership provides status, purpose and belonging. This does not prove that every reader is manipulated, but the mechanism strongly resembles the recruitment and retention structure of high-control apocalyptic movements.

I just spent the last two days at Lighthaven in Berkeley to listen to the AI doomer case for myself. Here’s what I discovered: Basically all of the “research” funnels back to one guy who dropped out of middle school. They have multiple organizations that all get funding from the same pot of money that founded Anthropic. These people are literally convinced that AI will exterminate humans in the next ten years, many assume it’s sooner, like in the next 12 months. Any attempts to ask simple questions like “how” will result in them being aggressively shaken and just disengaging from the conversation entirely. All of this nonsense is just science fiction corner cases that a bunch of drugged out nerds have been convinced to believe is real Their current configuration prevents the world from having an actual useful discussion of the actual risks that AI presents today like cyber attacks, psychological trauma, and concentration of power because that’s not “complete enough” for them. I believe this because I literally heard Nate Soares declare it on stage yesterday. He has no interest in engaging with anything less than extinction risk.

This information should be spread far and wide. I just spent two days at Lighthaven this week at one of their conferences to see for myself what these people are, and it’s scary

Say hi to Sidehoe The first AI assistant to manage your roster Try it now: sidehoe.chat

Calls to pace the frontier Releases a model the next week

Slow Down & Pace

Let me help everyone understand why @amazon doesn’t want Agents crawling their site. Amazon will show different customers different prices depending on a variety of factors including location and whether they are prime or not. Incidentally, prime customers tend to see higher prices than non prime customers in my testing and research Most humans will never pick up on this, and even most resellers on Amazon weren’t technical enough before AI to access the pricing API and do real research Agents will pick up on these pricing differences and unlock the exact patterns that determine Amazon’s predatory pricing algorithm, and then figure out the best set of conditions to make purchases and eat into Jeff’s margin

Grok 4.7 Dropped today. Here's my initial thoughts on the performance and when to use it, and one critical reason you should be using it instead of Claude. Here's my current stack (it changes constantly as models evolve) ChatGPT Astra = Architect Gemini 3.8 = Builder Grok 4.7 = Auditor Claude = CANCELLED

Are you blindly walking your company toward extinction by partnering with the wrong company? It's very clear that we can't trust Anthropic. Do yourself a favor and replace them with open weight, on prem models while you still can. Protect your IP

It’s so frustrating trying to put out honest, well researched content about AI and vibe coding, and then watching influencer children getting rich by spreading AI slop lies. Is this how punk bands felt when they watched Nickleback get rich?

Here's all the news that happened in AI last week, that's actually worth knowing: Everyone saw that Dario got frame mogged into oblivion, but barely any of you noticed that Mark Benioff used him like a sweat rag to wipe off his hand. That was rough. Dario and Anthropic are creating a bio lab for some reason, and more and more companies and people are waking up to the fact that they might be the single largest threat to humanity. Stick around until the end for a Dario themed image prompt challenge