The Automation Race: This AI subculture’s motto: Go, go, go

•  KEVIN ROOSE

SAN FRANCISCO: On a Monday night last month, a few hours after OpenAI held an event for developers in downtown San Francisco, hundreds of artificial intelligence aficionados packed into a three-story nightclub several blocks away to celebrate a looser, less corporate vision of the AI future.

Under colorful lights and screens showing anime images, the mostly young, mostly male crowd danced to a D.J. set by the musician Grimes, who is better known in tech circles as Elon Musk’s ex. A big banner on the wall read “Accelerate or Die.” Another sign showed a diagram of an AI neural network emblazoned with the motto “Come and Take It.” An AI start-up handed out promotional fliers that read “THE MESSENGER TO THE GODS IS AVAILABLE TO YOU.”

The party was called “Keep AI Open,” and it was a coming-out bash of sorts for Effective Accelerationism, one of the weirder and more interesting splinter groups that have emerged from the AI boom of the past year.

Effective Accelerationism (often shortened to “e/acc,” pronounced “e-ack”) is a loosely organized movement devoted to the no-holds-barred pursuit of technological progress. The group believes that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation.

The group formed on social media last year, and bonded in Twitter Spaces and group chats over memes, late-night conversations and shared scorn for the people they call “decels” and “doomers” — the people who worry about the safety of AI, or the regulators who want to slow it down. It has moved offline, too, with parties and hackathons in the Bay Area and beyond.

Effective Accelerationism began as a cheeky response to an older, more established movement — Effective Altruism — that has become a major force in the AI world. E.A., as the older group is known, got its start promoting a data-driven approach to philanthropic giving, but in recent years has been worrying about AI safety, and promoting the idea that powerful AI could destroy humanity if left unrestrained.

The battle between the e/accs and the Effective Altruists is one of many quasi-religious schisms breaking out in San Francisco’s AI scene these days, as insiders argue about how quickly the technology is progressing, and what should be done about it.

E/acc prefers the all-gas, no-brakes approach. Its adherents favor open-sourcing AI software rather than having it be controlled by big corporations, and unlike Effective Altruists, they don’t see powerful AI as something to be feared or guarded against. They believe that AI’s benefits far outweigh its harms, and that the right thing to do with such important technology is to get out of the way and let it rip.

Some of the ideas e/acc has adopted, like its opposition to regulation, are standard techno-libertarian gospel. Others resemble tenets of older Silicon Valley subcultures, like the Transhumanists and the Extropians, who also valued progress and resisted attempts to contain technology. The movement also borrows from the works of the British philosopher Nick Land, who wrote years ago that the accelerating forces of capitalism and AI would ultimately collide in a “techno-capital singularity,” a point at which technology would outstrip our ability to contain it. (More recently, Land has fallen out of favor after endorsing far-right ideas about race and authoritarianism.)

In a manifesto posted online last year, e/acc’s founders — all of whom used inside-joke pseudonyms like “Bayeslord” and “Based Beff Jezos” — described their goals in lofty, bombastic terms, writing that their goal was to “usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms.”

Most people, of course, want to keep the life-forms we already have, and critics of e/acc chafe at the idea that we should roll over and let the robots overtake us. Peter S. Park, an AI researcher at M.I.T. and the director of Stakeout.AI, an AI safety advocacy group, told me he considers e/acc “a dangerous unaccountable ideology inspired by replacing humanity with AI.”

I first heard about e/acc about a year ago. At the time, the movement seemed to consist mainly of bored tech workers who gathered late at night to have heady conversations about politics and philosophy, discuss the news and complain about the emerging narrative that AI was a looming threat to humanity.

“A lot of my personal friends work on powerful technologies, and they kind of get depressed because the whole system tells them that they are bad,” Guillaume Verdon, a 31-year old French-Canadian physicist who once worked in an experimental lab at Google, said in a Twitter Space earlier this year, which was transcribed by someone who attended. “For us, I was thinking, let’s make an ideology where the engineers and builders are heroes.”

Initially, I wrote the movement off as a fringe novelty — a bunch of Twitter-addicted techies with persecution complexes turning warmed-over Ayn Rand into edgy memes.

But a few months later, tech luminaries like Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, started showing up in e/acc’s Twitter Spaces, and proclaiming that he, too, believed in effective accelerationism. (Andreessen’s profile on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, now includes “e/acc,” and he listed Based Beff Jezos and Bayeslord as two of his “patron saints” in the techno-optimist manifesto he published in October.)

Garry Tan, the president of the influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, signalled his support for e/acc. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, replied to a Based Beff Jezos tweet and joked “you cannot out-accelerate me.” And the movement gradually broadened beyond A.I., with some leaders pushing for cryptocurrencies or nuclear fusion. Soon, the movement was gaining steam in Silicon Valley, and officials in Washington were warning about its growing influence. It was a sure sign, to the e/acc crowd, that they had trolled the right people.

Last week, Forbes revealed that Based Beff Jezos was actually Verdon, who now runs an AI hardware start-up called Extropic. (Verdon, who has had enough media exposure for one week, declined to be interviewed for this column.) His unmasking took some of the mystique out of e/acc, but it didn’t seem to dampen followers’ enthusiasm.