Jasmine Sun

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Jasmine Sun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And she was telling me how...

half of her cohort has decided to graduate early within just a few years of beginning their PhDs in order to get jobs at AI labs.

And they've actually curated their PhD dissertations for research that would be most likely to get them a job at an AI lab.

I've seen in my own community, tons of people who were independent writers or independent policy thinkers and policy advocates decide to leave those roles behind in order to get jobs at AI labs.

And these views, sure, you could call it like a normal amount of people like money,

But I think the scale of how much talent is flowing into a few specific labs really has to do with the fact that the AI community itself is promoting these widespread beliefs that if you do not have a stake, if you do not have literal equity in frontier AI, you are not going to have economic leverage in the future and you and your kids are going to be screwed.

And I've just heard in enough private conversations that

These are motivating people to make such decisions.

And it's clearly draining talent from the non-corporate independent ecosystem that I do start to take those memes somewhat seriously.

Yeah, I certainly think it's important that other people are focused on just the policy or just the technology itself.

But one thing that I think a lot of the community or even outside observers underestimate is that there are really very few people who are building and shaping the trajectory of frontier AI.

There are not that many researchers at these labs.

The reason they're getting paid these crazy, like,

$100 million packages to get poached from here to there and back again is because there are only so many people who have this much leverage, right?

And so what that means is that personal idiosyncratic belief systems can be quite load-bearing for really big decisions around how the technology, what technology is built, who it gets sold to, how it gets diffused.

I mean, in many ways, I think the existence of Anthropic is a bet on this thesis.

It's the fact that

If there's only one lab that is building the best enterprise agents or coding models or whatever it is, then they can't actually make principled decisions based on, say, Dario Amadei's personal beliefs that we don't want mythos to be used for mass surveillance or for autonomous robots right now.

We actually don't want to sell to Chinese companies and the Chinese government, even though market incentives would dictate that we ought to, because we have these principled beliefs around whether authoritarian governments ought to have access to frontier AI.

And so I think that in a world where there are just not that many actors and not that many players, understanding the particular philosophies and motivations of the few people who can decide actually is pretty predictive of some of these decisions that are made.

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