The Info Web

#ArtificialIntelligence

54 entries

People (22)

  • Amanda Askell Amanda Askell is the philosopher who leads the team shaping the character of Anthropic's Claude and is the principal author of its Constitution, an NYU-trained ethicist from the effective-altruism movement who was formerly married to its cofounder William MacAskill.
  • Ben Buchanan Georgetown CSET cyber and AI scholar hired into the Biden White House under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, who became its first Special Advisor for AI and later an outside advisor to Anthropic.
  • Brendan Bordelon Politico technology reporter, previously at National Journal, Morning Consult, National Review and the Daily Caller, who in 2023 reported on Open Philanthropy's network of funded AI policy fellows.
  • Brian Chau Canadian olympiad mathematician who founded the anti-regulation AI think tank Alliance for the Future, left it in 2025, then founded Effort, a publication investigating Coefficient Giving's funding of journalists and policy staff.
  • Daniela Amodei Daniela Amodei is the cofounder and president of Anthropic, who ran operations and people functions at Stripe and OpenAI before starting the company with her brother Dario, and who is married to Open Philanthropy cofounder Holden Karnofsky.
  • Dario Amodei Dario Amodei is the cofounder and chief executive of Anthropic, a physicist and computational neuroscientist who led GPT-2 and GPT-3 as OpenAI's vice president of research before leaving in 2020 with a group of colleagues to build a rival AI lab.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American writer and self-taught artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote the foundational texts of the LessWrong rationalist movement, was funded for a decade by Peter Thiel, and in 2025 was named by Thiel as an example of the technology-stopping 'Antichrist.'
  • Eric Schmidt Eric Schmidt is the former Google chief executive turned billionaire investor and architect of US national-security artificial-intelligence policy, who chaired two Pentagon advisory bodies while privately funding the AI and defense startups those bodies promoted.
  • Holden Karnofsky Cofounder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy and its co-CEO until 2023, a Redwood Research director, an OpenAI director from 2017 to 2021, Anthropic staff from 2025, and husband of Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
  • Ilya Sutskever Ilya Sutskever is the deep-learning researcher who co-built AlexNet under Geoffrey Hinton, cofounded OpenAI as its chief scientist, voted to remove and then reinstate Sam Altman in the November 2023 board crisis, and left in May 2024 to cofound Safe Superintelligence.
  • Jaan Tallinn Jaan Tallinn is the Estonian programmer who helped build Kazaa and Skype and turned the resulting fortune into the largest private funding stream for AI-safety and existential-risk work, cofounding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute and backing Anthropic and DeepMind.
  • Jack Clark Jack Clark is the cofounder and head of policy at Anthropic, a former technology journalist who ran policy and communications at OpenAI, co-chairs Stanford's AI Index, and writes the Import AI newsletter.
  • Jack LaSota Jack LaSota, who writes under the persona 'Ziz,' is an Alaska-born computer programmer and former rationalist who founded the group known as the Zizians around a theory of brain hemispheres and militant veganism, and who was arrested in Maryland in February 2025 as the group was tied to six deaths across three states.
  • Jeff Alstott IARPA program manager and National Security Council technology director who became founding director of RAND's Technology and Security Policy center and helped shape the compute thresholds in Biden's AI executive order.
  • John Schulman John Schulman is an OpenAI cofounder and reinforcement-learning researcher who created the PPO algorithm, helped build ChatGPT and the RLHF alignment behind it, left OpenAI for Anthropic in August 2024, and then cofounded Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist.
  • Marvin Minsky Marvin Minsky was an MIT cognitive scientist who co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, took funding from Jeffrey Epstein, and was named in a 2019 unsealed deposition by Virginia Giuffre, an allegation his widow disputed.
  • Michael Vassar Michael Vassar is an American businessman who served as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 2009 to 2011 and later led an informal circle, the Vassarites, that recruited from the rationalist movement and used confrontational psychological methods and psychedelics, and that is widely cited as the tendency from which the Zizian group splintered.
  • Mira Murati Mira Murati is the Albanian-born engineer who rose to chief technology officer of OpenAI, oversaw the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora, served as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis, left in September 2024, and founded the AI lab Thinking Machines Lab.
  • Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.
  • Ray Kurzweil Inventor and futurist who popularized the technological singularity, co-founded the Singularity Summit with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Singularity University at NASA Ames, and joined Google in 2012.
  • Sam Altman Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who led Y Combinator, cofounded and runs OpenAI, launched the iris-scanning identity project Worldcoin, and was briefly fired and reinstated as OpenAI chief executive in the November 2023 board crisis.
  • Timnit Gebru Computer scientist who left Google's Ethical AI team in December 2020 in a dispute over a paper on large language models, founded DAIR in 2021, and developed the TESCREAL critique with Émile P. Torres.

Organizations (22)

  • Anthropic AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu, funded early by Tallinn, Moskovitz and Bankman-Fried, deployed on classified networks, then blacklisted by the Pentagon in 2026.
  • Center for Applied Rationality The Center for Applied Rationality is a Berkeley nonprofit spun off from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2012 to teach rationality techniques through residential workshops, which served as a recruitment funnel for AI-safety work and whose 2019 alumni reunion was protested by the group that became the Zizians.
  • Center for Security and Emerging Technology Georgetown think tank on emerging technology and national security, launched in 2019 under former IARPA director Jason Matheny with 55 million dollars from Open Philanthropy, its main funder.
  • Centre for the Study of Existential Risk The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is a Cambridge University research center founded in 2012 by the philosopher Huw Price, the cosmologist Martin Rees, and the Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn to study catastrophic risks from advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and environmental collapse.
  • Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024.
  • Future of Life Institute The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit founded in 2014 by Max Tegmark and others to address existential risks from advanced technology, funded with an early ten million dollar gift from Elon Musk, that published the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments.
  • Horizon Institute for Public Service Nonprofit founded in 2022 that pays technology fellows placed in congressional offices, federal agencies and think tanks; Politico reported Open Philanthropy had effectively created it.
  • Institute for Progress Washington think tank founded in 2021 by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney with Open Philanthropy money, working on metascience, high-skilled immigration, biotechnology, infrastructure and emerging technology policy.
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Research agency of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, launched October 1, 2007, from NSA, NGA and CIA technology offices, whose ACE forecasting tournament produced the Good Judgment superforecasters.
  • Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged.
  • Open Philanthropy Grantmaker of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, renamed Coefficient Giving in 2025, which has given away about 7 billion dollars and funded CSET, RAND's AI work, Horizon fellows and Tarbell journalists.
  • OpenAI OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a billion-dollar pledge from backers including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, whose 2023 firing and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman exposed the conflict between its effective-altruism-aligned safety board and its commercial expansion.
  • Safe Superintelligence Safe Superintelligence is the AI lab Ilya Sutskever cofounded in June 2024 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, built to pursue a single safe-superintelligence goal with no commercial product, which raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion valuation and later 2 billion at a 32-billion valuation before Meta poached Gross and Sutskever became chief executive.
  • Scale AI San Francisco AI data company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang, holder of 105.6 million dollars in Army obligations, whose Labor Department inquiry was dropped in 2025 and in which Meta bought a non-voting stake.
  • Schmidt Futures Schmidt Futures is the philanthropic venture Eric and Wendy Schmidt launched in 2017 to fund science and technology talent, which paid the salaries of White House science staff before consolidating its core programs into Schmidt Sciences in 2024.
  • Special Competitive Studies Project The Special Competitive Studies Project is the nonprofit think tank Eric Schmidt founded in 2021 to continue his national-security commission's work on US competition with China in artificial intelligence and emerging technology.
  • Tarbell Center for AI Journalism Nonprofit launched in 2022 that pays early-career journalists placed in newsrooms to cover AI and publishes the newsletter Transformer; most of its funding comes from Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy.
  • The Zizians Small group around Jack LaSota that split from the Bay Area rationalist movement, tied to six deaths in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including a Border Patrol agent's.
  • Thinking Machines Lab Thinking Machines Lab is the AI research company Mira Murati founded in 2025 with a team drawn heavily from OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and adviser Bob McGrew, which raised a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion valuation reported as one of the largest seed rounds ever.
  • World Transhumanist Association Transhumanist membership organization founded in 1998 by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, later renamed Humanity+, which received Jeffrey Epstein money in 2010 and from his Gratitude America in 2018.
  • Worldcoin Worldcoin, rebranded World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project cofounded by Sam Altman and operated by Tools for Humanity that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to build a global proof-of-personhood database, and that has been banned or investigated in numerous countries over its data collection.
  • xAI xAI is the artificial-intelligence company Elon Musk founded in 2023 after departing OpenAI, builder of the Grok model and the Colossus supercomputer, which merged with X in 2025, raised tens of billions of dollars, and whose founder sued OpenAI and Sam Altman over the abandonment of OpenAI's nonprofit mission.

Events (1)

  • Singularity Summit The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil, that ran through 2012 as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute before the brand was sold to Singularity University in 2013.

Concepts (9)

  • Antichrist The Antichrist lectures are a four-part private series Peter Thiel delivered in San Francisco in 2025 arguing that the biblical Antichrist will arise through a one-world government built to manage existential risk, and naming technology critics including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom as its agents.
  • Cybernetics Cybernetics is the postwar science of control and communication in animals and machines, founded by Norbert Wiener and developed at the Macy Conferences, which diffused into computing, systems theory, artificial intelligence, and the Californian counterculture.
  • Effective Accelerationism Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a Silicon Valley techno-optimist movement that emerged in 2022 advocating the unrestricted acceleration of artificial intelligence and technology, defined against effective altruism's AI-safety 'doomerism,' and drawing on the accelerationism of Nick Land.
  • Effective Altruism Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud.
  • Extropianism Extropianism is the libertarian transhumanist movement founded by Max More in the late 1980s around the Extropy Institute, whose 1990s mailing list fed longtermism, the rationalist community and cypherpunk circles.
  • Rationalist Community The Rationalist Community is the Bay Area subculture that formed around Eliezer Yudkowsky's LessWrong writings and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in the late 2000s, organized around probability-based reasoning and artificial-intelligence existential risk, and from whose social network the Effective Altruism movement and the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations all emerged.
  • Singularitarianism Singularitarianism is the belief, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and popularized by Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book and his Singularity University, that accelerating technology will produce machine superintelligence and an irreversible transformation of human life.
  • TESCREAL TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence.
  • Transhumanism Transhumanism is the movement to use technology to transcend human biological limits, named in its modern sense by Julian Huxley in 1957 and organized through the World Transhumanist Association founded in 1998.