(2023-12-02) Who Is Based BeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's e/acc Movement?

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? Forbes has learned that Guillaume Verdon, the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic and a former Google engineer, is behind the provocative Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley.

Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen says @BasedBeffJezos is a “patron saint of techno-optimism.”

At its core, e/acc argues that technology companies should innovate faster, with less opposition from “decels” or “decelerationists” — folks like AI safety advocates and regulators who want to slow the growth of technology.

Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” he said. Of the Jezos persona, he said: “If you're going to create an ideology in the time of social media, you’ve got to engineer it to be viral.”

In August, The Information reported that Extropic, which was previously called Qyber, was designing a microchip “specifically to run LLMs,” or large language models. It has raised money from venture capital firms Hof Capital, Julian Capital, Buckley Ventures, and other minor investors. Verdon says he has raised $14.1 million.

At its core, effective accelerationism embraces the idea that social problems can be solved purely with advances in technology, rather than by messy human deliberation. “We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system." (technological determinism)

Not everyone agrees that engineering is the answer to societal problems. “The world is just not like that. It just isn’t,” said Fred Turner, a professor of communications at Stanford University who has studied accelerationism. “But if you can convince people that it is, then you get a lot of the power that normally accrues to governments.”

*Verdon is part of a loud chorus in the AI community who believe that this technology should not be developed in secret at companies like OpenAI, but instead be open-sourced. “We think this whole AI safety industry is just a pretense for securing more control,” he said.

“If you're interested in safety, decentralization and freedom is kind of the way to go,” he told Forbes. “We’ve got to make sure AI doesn't end up in the hands of a single company.”*

“Dude needs to dox himself, and start speaking math and engineering,” said another person.

Verdon said he has decided to take a different approach. “I guess that now that my identities are going to be correlated, that's going to allow me to put my actual name behind my words. And the reason I agreed to do this interview is because I think that it's kind of time for me to do that,” he said.

Stanford Noys, the Chichester professor, told Forbes that branding is critical to the accelerationist project. He compared e/acc to other familiar Silicon Valley and Wall Street hype cycles like cryptocurrency:

That idea of building something from nothing — called “hyperstition” — was popularized by Nick Land, a philosopher, blogger and activist who has been both credited as a father of modern accelerationism and discredited for his embrace of racism and the alt-right.

For all their talk of accelerating, it is not clear what future Verdon and other e/acc adherents want to accelerate into. Turner, the Stanford professor, said he wasn’t sure that they themselves know: “The truth is, they have no social vision. And they can’t have a social vision, because the solutions that they’re proposing to social change and social politics so radically simplify the complexities of social life.”

But Verdon has a social vision of his own: “If we can make it so that more people are optimistic about the future, are inclined to build, take risks and go forth and have the greatest impact it can on the world, that's a net positive.