Holly Elmore Personal blog of Holly Elmore, with a lot of thoughts about pausing AI. I’m the founder of PauseAI US and paid subscriptions to this blog are tax-deductible don...

“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.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

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 Listen to the episode → More from Holly Elmore → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

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

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