The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Daniel Kokotajlo reads as The Strategist because his defining act was a calculated one. He left a senior research role at OpenAI on principled grounds, having concluded the organisation was not taking its own safety commitments seriously enough. That was not drift, it was a precise, high-stakes call rooted in analytical judgement about institutional trajectory.
“I think if you were to try this, you would get something that was so obviously an AI house style that you would use the word delve or things kind of along those lines.”
“Regret that you're not the person who's the technical alignment genius who's able to solve everything, and getting to work with people like these and potentially make a difference just seem like a great opportunity. What I didn't realize was that I also learned a huge amount.”
“Bill Gates would complete this next character or something like that, and then there's the reinforcement learning in virtual environments, so get a team of AIs to play some multiplayer game.”
“Yeah, so I think that if you were to send a team of ethnobotanists into Australia and ask them using all the top technology and all of their intelligence to figure out which plants are safe to eat now, that team of ethnobotanists would succeed in fewer than 50,000 years. The problem isn't that they are dumber than the Aborigines exactly.”
The Diary of a CEO: “OpenAI Whistleblower FINALLY Speaks: “AI Has A 70% Chance Of Going Horribly Wrong!“”
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