Things Holly Elmore Has Said on Podcasts

“There's this huge talent farming operation. And AI alignment is the highest status cause for a decade. … There's all of this talent ready to work at places like OpenAI and Anthropic. And Anthropic is just EA now. … Without those talent bases, I don't think we would be in the situation we're in today.” — Holly Elmore, Doom Debates!

Elmore making the case that Eliezer Yudkowsky's rationalist and effective-altruist communities accelerated AI by producing the talent that went to the frontier labs. Host Liron Shapira partly agrees that Yudkowsky sped things up, but argues against her wider indictment.

Doom Debates! · 2026-10-13 Permalink → Listen →

Doom Debates! Around 1:06:15 into the episode

Holly Elmore

In 10 years? I don't know.

Liron Shapira

Okay, 30 years.

Holly Elmore

…this huge like talent farming operation. And AI alignment is the highest status cause for like a decade. And it's the basis of people love the like fun cult that Eliezer has made around it. Like they like HPMOR. They like the way the sequences are like being initiated into like being a wizard or something. And like, and that makes it so that this is like the hot place to be. And there's all, there's all of this talent ready to work at places like OpenAI and Anthropic. And Anthropic is just EA now. Like this is the project of EA now. Like all of the high status people went there. This is like the big thing going on. Without those talent bases, like I don't think we would be in the situation we're in today. Like that does make a difference. And so like, would there still be like progress in neural nets? Yes. Maybe someone would figure out transformers around the same time. Who knows? But…

Liron Shapira

Okay. So you've made your position pretty clear. So I'll just give my position for contrast. So I will agree that Eliezer accelerated progress towards super intelligence. I mean, Sam Altman himself has in this very dickish way, right, come out and say like, oh, thank you, Eliezer, for accelerating…

Holly Elmore

it's not that funny. It's just that I described it exactly that way to a journalist the other day. And like, so, yeah, as like a dagger. Yeah. Yeah,

Liron Shapira

exactly. Right. So I'll admit, I'll say five years. You know, I think it could easily be more than five. It could easily be less than five. It's hard for me to guess exactly. So let's call it five years. I think he accelerated AI. I also think like when I just zoom out, I'm like, okay, the impact…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“You should start really with what you want or even more as far as negotiating. And so starting weaker with, oh, maybe we should just slow down and more wishy-washy. If we had done that, then the debate now would be something closer to, do we have to stop it all? So you really don't do yourself any favors by weakening your opening position.” — Holly Elmore, Doom Debates!

Elmore, who runs PauseAI US, explaining why the movement asked for a full pause rather than a slowdown. She argues that "slow" or "pace" is now what the AI companies themselves offer, only because the pause demand moved the Overton window first.

Doom Debates! · 2026-10-13 Permalink → Listen →

Doom Debates! Around 11:30 into the episode

Holly Elmore

lines. He was the guy on the megaphone, like keeping everybody kind of like entertained for the whole protest, like and getting lots of great clips. Like he would just like go for like an hour oratory. It was very impressive.

Liron Shapira

…to it because you're like, oh, okay, it's like pause, but it's more measured, right? Whereas if you'd yelled pace the frontier a couple years ago, it'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pace the frontier. What is this? Where is this coming from? Right. Because the idea hadn't been seeded in mind space.

Holly Elmore

Yeah. And I, you know, for just a little info about how the Overton window works, like, you should start really with like what you want or even more as far as like negotiating, you know? And so starting weaker with like, oh, like maybe we should just slow down and more like wishy-washy. Like if we had done that, you know, then the debate now would be something like closer to like, do we have to stop it all? You know, so you really don't do yourself any favors by like weakening your opening position. And like now slow, instead of being like people kind of trying to meet Pause AI and like suggesting like, well, maybe we could slow down. Like slow is now the offer of these companies, but they had to, you know, name it their own thing. Pace.

Liron Shapira

So also regarding PASAI, there's two organizations, as you said, there's PauseAI US and there's PASAI Global. And within POS AI Global, I know there's people who are, you know, there's like PauseAI US, PASA France, PASAI Belgium. So there's regional chapters of it, but then PauseAI US is just a…

Holly Elmore

No, they disendors me. It was specifically me. Yeah.

Liron Shapira

At the end of the day, we all want to see AI get paused. I think the two organizations are aligned, even if they're not operationally working together. We also want to talk about Eliezer Yudkowsky, the leader of the movement, somebody I've been following since 2007. I've said on this show last year…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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