Happy Friday!
This month’s reading diary is out—six books! Not bad.
Helen
The Big Feud Behind AI
Daniela [Amodei] had an unusual process for working through conflicts. She and [her husband Holden] Karnofsky had a large collection of stuffed animals, which they treated as their personal advisory council for managerial role-playing. Each animal had an assigned character profile. Jinji was a lazy cat who encouraged Daniela to cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work. Maura, a pink bear, was a detail-oriented, type-A manager. A panda named Beary Bonds was the “patron bear of generosity and empathy.” She treated these exercises as something between an inside joke and an earnest management technique. (In 2023, she told me the animals were “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”) And although not many people at OpenAI knew about the animals, the ones who did weren’t sure how seriously she took their advice.
That year, the Amodeis began building their own nucleus inside OpenAI. “Dario’s clique,” as some people called it—though it was really both his and Daniela’s—set up private Slack channels and held their own meetings. They talked constantly about safety, using jargon that was unfamiliar to the more technical engineers. And to the people who weren’t invited, it felt standoffish—a safety splinter cell that was refusing to work with anyone else.
A decade ago, three of the biggest rivals in the AI world—Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei (plus his sister Daniela)—were all involved in the same company, OpenAI. The story of why and how these former compatriots splintered is fascinating, and it’s the subject of Kevin Roose’s new book, of which this is an extract. (Roose has just joined The Atlantic as a contributing writer.) The OpenAI camp think the Anthropic lads are “power-hungry virtue-signalers” while the Anthropic types think that the OpenAI people are too casual about safety, or maybe even “evil”. I suspect everyone thinks Elon Musk should put down the ketamine and read a book.
Grow Up, Taylor
A few years ago, after watching the Eras Tour, I wrote that Taylor Swift had a problem: she appeared trapped, in her 30s, in a perpetual girlhood of crushes and bleachers and meeting behind the mall. Wouldn’t all this juvenalia sound a little discordant if she was still indulging it as a 40-year-old billionaire? Well, the Encore tracks for Life of A Showgirl have given us the answer. Swift, a newly married 36-year-old, is still fighting with the internet and portraying her relationship with human labrador Travis Kelce as a HUGE MIDDLE FINGER TO THE HATERS. This schtick is unseemly, and also musically and lyrically exhausted.
My colleague Spencer Kornhaber notes here that, at 39, Madonna put out Ray Of Light, and took her career in a new and fruitful direction. I hope Taylor can do the same. Otherwise we’re going to get more songs like “Wood”, and no one wants that1.
BRB, having a whipround to fund my purchase of the Lego Sagrada Familia. It’s 12,060 pieces! I reckon that would keep Jonathan occupied until at least 6.30pm on Christmas Day.
Quick Links
My contribution to the Discourse last week was an article on the mask-optional lesbian bar drama: you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with Long Covid (The Atlantic, gift link). This week, I wrote about a Republican senator who face-planted in a committee hearing (gift link).
‘When the groypers posted on X and Telegram that women belonged in breeding gulags or were too stupid to vote, she’d defended them, telling her own audience that the edgy jokes made “inconvenient truths more digestible” for a new generation of conservative men. When Fuentes said women made men “want to cut their heads off,” she’d defended that, too, calling it a natural reaction to the modern thinking that taught women to push men away. “He shows a lot of respect for the women who are respectable,” she said in an interview.”’ Oh girl, no. This story has an ending you can already guess from just this quotation. (Washington Post, gift link)
“By night two he’d eaten the box and we had to move him into a wicker basket, which he also ate.” Very few dogs are as memorable as Felicity Cloake’s ornery cairn terrier Wilf—I say this as someone who was once nipped on the buttock by him—and her tribute to him is lovely (Substack).
What if ADHD was more about “sustained engagement” rather than attention per se? Interesting perspective (NYT, gift link).
That’s all for now!
For evidence of this, watch the moment in this viral fan-reaction video where the one on the left realises she has built a career on liking this music and can’t slag it off.
As someone who may or may not have ADHD (late private diagnosis lol) the focus on motivation rather than attention in assessing the disorder as argued in the NYT makes sense; honestly I'd like to add more exciting insight but I can't be bothered
You always manage to find the strangest things, and I find them enlightening but sometimes in a very worrying way.
The ADHD thing absolutely makes sense. Attention to a drawing task can be measured by the movement of the eyes, and studies have not found a lack of attention in this area in ADHD subjects, but the lack of prolonged engagement would need different investigations.