Jeremie Harris
Physicist-turned AI startup founder who co-founded the AI safety company Gladstone AI and the AI mentorship marketplace SharpestMinds.
“We were expressly told by OpenPhil not to talk to the U.S. government to really do much of anything on the AI risk issue. Because if you talk to the U.S. government, you see, they're going to hear you say AGI is going to be a really big deal. … And then they're going to ignore everything you say about the risk. They're going to do a Manhattan project and just get us killed sooner. That was literally the frame that we were given by multiple people at OpenPhil at the time.”
Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Harris is explaining why he and his brother stayed outside the effective-altruist AI safety world in the early 2020s, when Open Philanthropy was the main funder of the field. He says they ignored the advice after a couple of weeks and started talking to officials anyway. He adds that he doesn't mean it as a gripe against Open Philanthropy.
Transcript
…the Kaplan paper, scaling laws for neural language models. And the GPT-3 paper itself also had these scaling laws. This is back when the Frontier Labs actually published stuff, right? So you could actually look and see, like, well, ask yourself, what happens if this just keeps going? And it has.
Nice. And then even before 2020, what was your guys' entry into the rationalist community or any adjacent community or EA? How far back do you go?
…arguments for loss of control found them pretty hard to refute. And from, I think from outside that world, it was a lot easier to decide to do something. There was like a period in 2020 where like Open Philanthropy was like the only funder of AI safety kind of work, right? And obviously they were aligned to like Dustin Moscovitz and there's all the kind of politicization that comes from that. We were expressly told by OpenPhil not to talk to the U.S. government to really do much of anything on the AI risk issue. Because if you talk to the U.S. government, you see, they're going to hear you say AGI is going to be a really big deal. Maybe the labs have figured out how to build it. And then they're going to ignore everything you say about the risk. They're going to do a Manhattan project and just get us killed sooner. That was literally the frame that we were given by multiple people at OpenPhil at the time. And we took it seriously for all of two weeks before we, our instinct, the startup founders was really just like…
Within the government also, it's, you know, it's kind of cliche to complain about bureaucracy, but it really is a huge, huge problem. We've seen this in our business that we want. Like we mostly sell to the U.S. government or the armed forces, but also just like talking to people. Some of the best…
Nice. Okay. We're going to definitely keep diving into your latest report about what's going to go down with the U.S. and China and your recommendations. But first, backing up a little bit, I want to get some more info about you guys. I first became aware of your work in, I don't even know, a…
Oh, geez. How, so are we special or are we really super duper extra special? I think that's a question for our mom first and foremost. But the, so I. I do think there's something we're so Ed, with your apologies, I'll say that I think there's something neuroatypical about Ed in particular. In…
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