The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
dwarkesh.com · 4,189 words · saved by 19 readers
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
Many thanks especially to Oak Hu, who paired with me for most of the writing, and also to Adam Kaufman and Alex Mallen, who paired with me during parts of research. You can watch or listen to me narrate this essay on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Two…
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