The Treason LARP: How to Think About Open AI, #DefenseTech and Other Grifts
The counterintelligence sweep continues whether or not Silicon Valley feels safe.
If you look closely you can see an American shanking the hands of a Chinese intelligence officer. Here is Peng Xiao, shaking Sam Altman’s hand, at an event in Abu Dhabi where Altman and Peng planned to set their own software industrial policy in contravention of the U.S. CHIPS Act.
I love this photo as it expresses so much in what’s wrong with our moment — the son of a mobster from St. Louis and the faceless Chinese, convening tie-less, of course, in the United Arab Emirates, to figure out how to screw America.
I can’t be the only person who marveled at the Strum and Drang over the weekend regarding Open AI. It was fascinating to watch in the sort of way that public muggings so often are. Who knew that high interest rates led to inner Silicon Valley mob wars?
Let me boil it down for you: You’re watching a counterintelligence sweep of Sam Altman and Open AI and perhaps also of Microsoft. It’s frankly a bit glorious though as with so many things from our Imperial Capital it’s long overdue.
This sweep, sweep is a combination of AUKUS working alongside our Middle Eastern allies who want security guarantees and Chinese technology.
Don’t believe me?
Well, let’s consider who is the board and whether or not they are likely to submit to all the pressure that Altman and his supporters are bringing to muster.
Adam D’Angelo, American
Some years ago I spoke with D’Angelo about how the U.S. intelligence community was going to be more involved in startups moving forward. Whereas many of his peers demurred he was utterly fascinated. I suspect that D’Angelo is a patriotic nerd. I texted him some support. In what might pass for the height of irony
Ilya Sutkever, Canadian-Israeli-Russian.
For our purposes what’s interesting is how Geoffrey Hinton was his advisor. Hinton resigned his position at Google over concerns with how AI research was advancing. Hinton is seemingly the British deep state. To be sure there’s a bit of buyer’s remorse from Sutkever but les jeux sont faits.
Much ink has been spilled on Sutkever but I think the answer lies closer to the ladies of the board. Cherchez les femmes, mes amis. The Distaff side of life knows so much more than we do about so much without seemingly bothering to study it. Ah, yes women’s intuition is real and they are not so easily conned by America’s flim flam men especially when they are a part of the Anglosphere. Believe all women may go too far but certainly listen to them as they so often know what’s up.
Helen Toner, Australian.
Of the board members Toner strikes me as the most pro-deep state of the lot. To read her CV — China, DC, Australia — is to know. You can feel it, especially after all the training I’ve given you Padawan.
Tasha McCauley, Kiwi.
McCauley is involved in a very engaged with a mapping community, which is a classic deep state pursuit.
McCauley is married to Joseph Gordon-Levitt who was famously Robin in Christopher Nolan’s very deep state batman. These things don’t just happen.
And while we may still be en media res here I do think there are large societal questions here that need careful consideration. We’ve elsewhere probed the problems of Mira Murati and her family connections in Albania so we weren’t terribly surprised that she turned out to have been a bit of a plant — just as we said at the time.
I don’t know who needs to hear this precisely but the US government needs to step in regarding OpenAI’s soaking up the computer science talent in the United States to work on fake problems. Maybe the ousting of Altman is what this looks like.
But good heavens there are a lot of people working at Open AI! Over 700 signing a letter? What do they, you know, do all day? What precisely are they working on?
It’s more accurate to say it’s what they aren’t working on that’s important. They aren’t working for the Pentagon. Nor are they terribly engaged in anything other than each other and their terminally online “fan” base. With the same vigor they brought to the school play they know bring to the national stage.
Perhaps the whole OpenAI “investment” and “charity” is itself an op to distract America and to get our eyes off the ball about what’s really going on. Is this an intellectual cul de sac? Or a real honest to goodness cult? Or is it both and more all at once? Discuss amongst yourselves.
What is rather apparent is this truism: These are not serious people but then so many of them were identified, groomed, and turned as children. It is downright shocking how many of home were child stars or extreme body builders and I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how many of them are gay — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Unless, of course, they were targeted by gay predators and then it’s a feature, isn’t it Keith Rabois? Isn’t it Sam Altman? After all, one man’s “founder” is another person’s fresh meat, I suppose. The casting couch has migrated from L.A. to San Fransisco to Miami.
Did they — did I — ever really stand a chance? I think about this often as I was nearly one of them. I woke up right before they sent me to the slaughter house but I do not forget the stench or how I planned my escape.
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There’s a section in one of James Bamford’s books on the NSA where he talks about how the NSA has its own chip foundry. You should consider Gina Raimondo’s CHIPs Act as merely an extension of that good effort. Your guess is as good as mine if it’ll work. So, too, should you take seriously efforts to expand the Environmental Protection Agency globally through satellites.
It’s curious how many of these tech guys who miss various things. Why is that?
It occurs to me, though, that a lot of this Silicon Valley stuff is mere pageantry and that nearly all of the major players in it are playing some different game than they claim. These are constructs, wandering around. I like to try to find the handlers and shut them down.
Whether it is Trae Stephens of Founders Fund whose father ran theme parks and who naturally thinks he’s entitled to direct #DefenseTech investment after effectively interning for the disgraced CIA director George Tenet or whiz kid turned full of shit man Marc Andreessen who pontificates on matters great and small and absurd, you do sometimes wonder if the whole thing is just some kind of sick joke where the theatre kids replace the student body president or the science club with the fake intimation of the thing.
Some years ago my then-wife forced me to watch The Big Bang Theory. She had compared me to one of the characters — Sheldon — and so naturally I wanted to see what my fictional self looked like. “It’s a show about nerds,” she told me, hoping that I’d be interested but these weren’t nerds. These were a gay man’s interpretation of what nerds might look like. They were fake like the women imagined in the gay fever dream of Sex in the City.
Rather funnily I later learned that Jacob Helberg, a senior advisor to Palantir and husband to sexual predator and venture capitalist Keith Rabois, was a cousin to one of the actors from The Big Bang Theory. I found that strange — until I realized that the skillset to act in a Hollywood production is roughly the same as those required to act as a CEO in Silicon Valley. We will have more on Helberg later but for now, my goodness.
Fittingly I also learned that Marc Andreessen had patterned A16Z on Creative Artists Agency, the talent system that Michael Ovitz had pioneered in Hollywood. Sometimes the language is the same — we hear a lot about “top talent” from both Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Sure, con man venture capitalist Josh Wolfe can don a suit and warn us about the mistreatment of the Uighurs but never the Palestinians in a congressional committee but if you ask him to actually do his duty and invest in companies or people that the U.S. state wants he can’t be found. It’s all one big LARP.
The Instagram does not lie — or at least the Instagram of their lovers — and you can see all about the lavish and absurd lifestyle so many of these types live.
Who the fuck do these LARPers think they are? That’s the takeaway I have watching the speech from Katherine Boyle the other day at that #DefenseTech conference. I came across it after someone set it to me from that weirdo Josh Steinman. As with all cults the lemmings are expected to show their devotion by praising the leader (or at least the mommy with the checkbook).
Naturally a version of the Boyle speech appeared on Bari Weiss’s Free Press which is usually fact free and Middle Eastern subsidized. How long will this UAE or Saudi cash last? Don’t ask such a rude question, Charles! Hey Middle East! Don’t you get tired of these conmen?
We’ve been over Bari Weiss’s odd history already — you should read that! — and I don’t want to beat up on this other than to say that you lose instant credibility the second you show up on Weiss’s site.
This is the closing paragraph:
We don’t win a war against bad ideologies unless we know who we are, what we stand for, and where we’re headed. And if we lose this silent war—the ultimate war for American ideals—it’s not because we don’t have the know-how to build missiles and hypersonics and attributable systems and drone swarms. It will be because we doubt our inheritance. Because we doubt the beauty and nobility of what we’re building. Because we doubt that American Dynamism is true and the key to a safer, more prosperous civilization.
Look at how artfully this is attempted. This is a grift off of the U.S. defense industry. You don’t even really know what’s going on here, ma’am. Try not to do anything before someone gets hurt.
Really? A beauty queen turned society page writer is lecturing me about what makes for good technology? What it takes to win a war? Really? Beauty queen of only eighteen she decided she’d go and write for The Washington Post before her old pal Trae helped her swing a gig at Founders Fund and then Andreessen Horowitz.
Bitch, please. My family worked at Raytheon and E Systems. My namesake is one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century. I have a bunch of companies which are doing millions of dollars worth of business in government contracts, companies which your firms rejected and contracts you said we couldn’t get. I mean come on now, honey. Who are you trying to con? Oh, that’s right. The U.S.A. Well, how about no?
It’s not as if many of these investors weren’t given the chance. At some point — maybe soon, hint hint — someone will sue one of these firms and reveal that they are, in fact, fronts for Chinese/Israeli/Russian/Emirati cash and that far from offering bright Americans a step up as they fraudulently pretend they’ll just as soon steal from them.
The defenestration of Altman is a start at making it right. Will this work? I don’t know but at least now we’re showing up.
Yes, we are destroying ChatGPT and other predatory measures. Yes, it’s tough to make a precise accounting but this countermeasure staves off an attack on basic sense making and many of their intended targets were our kids. This disruption prevents the manipulation of American kids.
Speaking of child stars and sexual predators in tech...how about Brock Pierce and his involvement with DEN? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/found-the-elusive-man-at-the-heart-of-the-hollywood-sex-abus
Hopefully someone will take Rabois down soon....will it be you? He's been getting away with shit for years