He's roommates with an Anthropic researcher, I was roommates with a Google product manager I don't think I'm really bought out by Google.

Also Anthropic has made very clear they align closely with the DoW.

Really Anthropic doesn't seem to be fighting for anyone but a narrow subset of people.

So who cares, none of the but AI providers are particularly ethical. Pick your poison as your conscious and needs allow.

In my view, this guy's podcast didn't get big talking about AI, it's best known for cold war history and foreign policy discussions with Sarah Paine of the U.S. Naval War College.

>I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere

He was first funded by FTX

It's entirely fake, sure Palantir uses Claude, but it takes about 10 minutes to pull all their federal contracts and realize the little involvement they have in the kill chain is preliminary

It doesn't matter what you know so much as who you know. Networking is the most precious currency. He met the right people, got the right guests, and surfed a wave of fortunate occurrences. He was roommates with Dylan Patel of TheIjnformation, and John Y of Asionometry, and has since developed a wide range of high level industry contacts.

Sometimes people succeed without earning it, and what matters is what they do with the success afterwards. I'd say Dwarkesh earned it, but got lucky and caught the right waves, and has surfed the hell out of his success. He's had consistently well informed, level headed takes, and has engaged the field with insight and honest curiousity.

When I see people surf like that, I applaud it. There's nothing grifty or shady, he's just had a great series of excellent opportunities and has played them for everything they're worth. Once he had a few billionaires on, that was all the social cache he needed to continue attracting guests and high level researchers and other figures in AI.

Yes he is room-mates with.

It seems to me that AI target-selection systems are being used not just for efficiency, but as a way to distance military staff from responsibility for what they are killing. Current AI models naturally speculate and hallucinate if you don’t tightly constrain them. we see this all the time as software engineers when working with agentic coding.

This creates a dangerous dynamic. AI can generate targets that a human operator might not be able to justify manually, and when something goes wrong the blame can always be shifted to the system, such as the recent incident where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting.

Israel’s way of fighting this war looks more like pure destruction than a conventional military campaign, and AI systems like this are very easy to abuse in that context. At this point it’s clear that even the U.S. is willing to eliminate targets even when the collateral damage includes the person’s family or neighbors. I don’t think that would have been acceptable in previous administrations. Israel has lowered the bar.

That may be why Anthropic moved early to denounce this kind of usage, even though they had previously partnered with the Department of War.

Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070

From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see:

“Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”

This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War.

My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position.

It’s also just a category error. It’s like saying that 99% of farm workers are tractors or 99% of textile workers are looms.

I went a bit further and then gave up on the piece. Unfortunate, as the premise seemed interesting.

It's just... immensely self-aggrandizing nonsense. The subhed

> “Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”

Like come on. The cuban missile crisis, for starters? Bro needs to calm tf down.

Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.

It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.

> go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness

Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago.

Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.

There is nothing unconstitutional about the first paragraph of your criticism. What is unconstitutional is restricting your ability to write this criticism, which is not breached.

You _could_ argue that this is a flaw in the constitution, and that none of the above should be legal, and that people who support those things should be restricted in their speech or ability to hold office. This was the status quo in politics for a while! These things have all existed for a long time but this seems particularly targeted at Trump, who was famously banned from most social media platforms for years.

There are a lot of democracies (most of the EU for example) that take this stance on freedoms and will even overturn elections to prevent those who support those policies. The question is really 'does doing that protect freedom and democracy or infringe it?'

As for the second paragraph, this is just a lie, Congress has not abdicated any type of war powers to the Cabinet. There has not been any type of declaration of war, and if Congress wanted to stop the DoD, they very much could and in fact came very close to doing so. If your Congress representative did not represent your interests (in this case voted nay), you can call email etc. them and their office or vote them out.

> better country that believes in freedom and goodness

I think you're letting your strong feelings here cloud your judgement, you can hold all of these opinions above without needing to fellate China, which is objectively worse on freedoms than the US. It's also important not to conflate "believes in freedom" with "perfectly meets my line of freedom."

People who buy the USA-vs-China race to a specific goal - do they really believe if China gets "AGI" first, they will immediately try to conquer the USA? How exactly will that go?

I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!

You didn’t find this part naive?

> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. This includes the soldiers (by which I mean the robot armies), the superhumanly intelligent advisors and engineers, the police, you name it.

The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.

As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply.

I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.

This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.

> Who is learning this for the first time only now?

A teenager, probably. Not everyone is 100 years old.

I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing.

What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to goods/services they are providing to the military, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to your military contracts.

> why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation

Because you can't designate a company a SCR because you don't like the contract you signed with them.

> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom.

The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true:

1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers.

2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome.

Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution.

And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.

I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.

Imagine if 5 years ago people said that 99% of the world's software would be written, designed, and tested by AI within 10 years. That would be insane hype and hopium and... oh wait..

> The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door.

I've reached similar conclusions about the problems with democracy but always struggle with any potential solutions. Looking at the the world, I don't see any viable alternative forms of government, just slight variations that still suffer from the same core problems but to a lesser degree

LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title.

AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of)

Wikipedia's list of AI applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applic...

I’m also as pedantic as you and use “LLM” even talking about these systems but you need to be flexible and accept that “AI” is already in everyone’s head when referring to GPT variants.

How is this related to the current discussion at hand?

This is pedantic. AI has many definitions. There was "AI" powering enemies in 80s and 90s video games

I think that when some people talk about "AI" they have "AGI" in mind, and when others talk about "AI" they have "latest computer does the smarts" in mind.

I personally would prefer "AI" to be "AGI" but there's no point fighting the way people use language (see: every damned pedantic comment about English usage ever!! :-)

Military orders are text.

Dwarkesh is even more astroturfed than Lex Fridman. The interviews they do are just ads. No challenges, no hard questions. All seem staged and prepared.

Dwarkesh was ready to whitewash Elon the day after his Epstein emails came out. None of them should be taken seriously.

Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.