I've been closely following the ongoing drama regarding the "coup" of OpenAI. In a shocking move, CEO Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, catching seemingly everyone off guard, even Microsoft which has invested north of 10B.

Latest I hear is that a huge number of OpenAI employees have threatened to quit if Altman is not reinstated, and Sam Altman may be negotiating to get his job back along with governance reform to place himself more firmly holding the reins of power.

Lots of theories have been made to explain this turn of events, and many are framing this as a battle between Effective Altruism vs Effective Accelerationism.

It's important to note both philosophies are not polar opposites of each other, in fact, they share many of the same assumptions, and are held by more or less exactly the same demographic of rich silicon valley men.

But as OpenAI explodes towards a 90B valuation and the rumors that AGI (artificial general intelligence) has already been invented or or is about to be, small differences in philosophy can still lead to monumental power struggles.

As a reminder, whichever company capitalizes on AGI first will likely be worth more than all of the other megacap tech companies put together. This is a world-altering amount of money and power we could be talking about here.

Om the other hand, it could all still be decades off. LLM architecture, although a major innovation, has not shown to be capable of simply scaling up to human level intelligence. OpenAI might have actually run up against a wall.

Sam Altman is seen as doing everything he can to accelerate, including using capitalism to build products, to make huge amounts of money. In contrast, the OpenAI board, led by Ilya Sutskever, may want to take a more careful approach, with less focus on capitalism, and more focus on deliberate academic research. They want an AI that is perfectly aligned to their own corporate goals even if that means slowing down the release of new products. And they want OpenAI to go back to its roots as a genuine nonprofit again.

Effective Altruists have been maligned as doomers or decelerationists but this isn't accurate. They want AGI also. But they want AGI to be protected and safe. They want regulatory capture, they want open source AI stopped. In short, they want themselves to be fully in control, to be the priests who protect the rest of the world from the AGI god. And it just so happens that by doing this they will make a shit-ton of money which they will rationally spend on altruism such as ending poverty or colonizing Mars.

Both EA and e/acc are essentially variants of an AGI cult, much in the same way Abrahamic religions are very similar to each other yet behave diatrically opposed to each other in the global struggle for dominance.

I can't predict what will happen with Sam Altman and OpenAI. But I will say if Altman is reinstated, it could be interpreted as a major victory for the hypercapitalist accelerationists.