Amjad Masad

Like exercise to exhaustion to weight, like you can't really think a lot and a lot of people find that.

But I think you can replicate it in different religious practices and things like that.

But for me, like I found that cold plunge just forces my mind in a certain way and I've...

But by the way, part of the reason why I didn't,

focus on that is because I think their influence is waning.

When I did that interview in 2024, it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms.

And I think luckily through various things that happened, including tech people responding to it, their influence is sort of waning.

But certainly, I mean, in that interview, I talk at length about

the self-serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to manipulate people and to gain all sorts of favors and weird things that are happening there.

But luckily, they're not as important.

The cool thing about large-language models is that

it doesn't really matter because it is a very simple process.

Being at the frontier is very hard, like creating GPT-5.3 or Opus 4.5 or whatever.

GPT-2 at some point was the frontier.

Now you can train GPT-2 on your phone.

So there isn't enough of a gap that they can create

to have proprietary technology this technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really really quickly on order of months um now we have open source models from china coming out and maybe there's involved in the government there but the uh coming out that are as good as like the you know models that came out three months ago from anthropic and open ai

So maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things and as compute gets cheaper, anyone can replicate these things at home.

And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today.

These companies are trying to create enough of a mode around data and compute and things like that.