Comment by CobrastanJorji
22 days ago
It's not a bad theory, but I think you're making the logical man's mistake of trying to ascribe a lot of intelligence and strategy to a move because on the surface it's irrational. Not every villain's move is a mysterious Xanatos gambit. Sometimes billionaire assholes just do dumb stuff because they can and/or because they're full of small-minded hatred.
Sometimes rich, powerful people do stuff that's irrational. When you see Trump attack Iran and you think "this doesn't appear to make sense," you can reason "there must have been secret intelligence proving that Iran was about to nuke Israel because otherwise it was a stupid move," or you can reason "it didn't make sense because it was a stupid move."
I think this depends on point of view. I do think much of this comes down to sour grapes that they didn't let Elon control OpenAI, and this is the wedge he chose to retaliate. Would he have sour grapes if he didn't want to win the AI race himself?
Really comes down to what you think his primary motivation is and what are just benefits.
When Musk signed on to help OpenAI initially, he claimed it was to set up guardrails so AI would be aligned with the best interests of humans.
After OpenAI went for-profit and China became a significant AI powerhouse, he no longer cares about safety and just insists that his team get “there “ (whatever the destination is) before “they” do. I’m not so certain he has a coherent belief system, but is probably further into AI psychosis or paranoid delusions than we want to believe.
Terrible options for a person with some of the most wealth in the tech world and perhaps just as influential, given that he effectively ensured Trump won in 2024, had direct foreign policy comms with Putin post-2022, controls the only cost-effective gateway to space, was given the keys to destroy his own regulators, is impregnating dozens of women (but perhaps not paying for those kids), etc.
That's fair although I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was a rational move. I think if he had won, it might have actually been worse for him (who knows what the collateral damage to the AI bubble would have been). I just think his goal was mostly to do as much harm as possible to people he clearly hates.