How Peter Thiel’s Relationship With Eliezer Yudkowsky Launched the AI Revolution
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Summary
Peter Thiel has had a large influence on Sam Altman throughout his career.
Their relationship began when Thiel bankrolled Altman’s first venture fund in 2012 with the sale of Altman’s first startup.
Thiel became the loudest voice critiquing the lack of true technological progress amidst all the hype - “Forget flying cars,” he quipped during a 2012 Stanford lecture.
Altman soon took over at Y Combinator, where he began focusing on “hard tech” moonshots like nuclear energy and supersonic planes - taking his cues from Thiel.
Thiel was also one of the first large investors in DeepMind, which would later become a part of Google.
Another early investor was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a former wunderkind who became the world’s foremost AI doomsday prophet due to his early influence on Thiel.
Yudowsky started out as a charismatic techno-optimistic wunderkind who excelled at rallying investors, researchers, and eccentrics around a quest to “accelerate the singularity.”
Thiel would later invest in Yudowsky’s Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
