Machine God: Hsu, Greer, Huang – #120

Steve Hsu (0:03)

This message is for some friends at Mechanize, a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough encoding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring. See the links in the show notes. Compensation is extremely competitive for technical roles, $300,000 to $500,000 per year in salary, plus additional benefits and equity compensation. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example, a research engineer position focused on alignment. This person will build evals that test for misaligned model behavior, salary $500,000 a year.

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Mechanize understands that my readership and my listenership on this podcast is highly selected. There is a very good chance you will be interviewed if you apply via the link in the show notes.

John Greer (1:21)

I wasn't expecting that or to think about that when we first started doing the film. I thought we would do these interviews. We would cover the accelerationists and the AI safety people. But I really think it's a key piece and I think the film has done a great job, especially with how you trace the intellectual history of these ideas and that Techno Capital is such a key piece of why it's such a difficult problem from the point of view of slowing down or stopping it. Like you're saying, even if we convince some of the lab leaders, it's like the system will just push it forward.

I think the fact that we went to this event with Nick Land, and the vibes were so religious in a way, ritualistic. I wasn't aware of how much this can, I don't want to say religious, but these ideas can underplay so much of what's going on.

Steve Hsu (2:29)

Welcome to Manifold. My guests today are Lei Huang and John Greer, two friends of mine, and my collaborators in the making of our AI documentary film, Machine God.

John and Lei, welcome to the show.

John Greer (2:47)

Well, it's really interesting being on the other side, being on the show.

It feels like an honor. How are you feeling, Lei?

Lei Huang (2:54)

Feeling great.

SPEAKER_4 (2:55)

Yeah.

Lei Huang (2:55)

Thanks, Steve.

Steve Hsu (2:56)

Well, it's an honor to have you guys, and I think the reason I wanted to make this episode was to explain to people how we made this movie, why we made this movie, what we hope to convey through this film, what we learned.

Let's get to it. We started this project when? Do you guys remember? Was it in January of 2026?

John Greer (3:19)

I think it was conceived in January. Steve, do you want to talk about where the idea came from?

Steve Hsu (3:27)

My wife and I were in Berkeley for an extended period last spring. We were living not very far from Lighthaven, actually. For people who know Berkeley, we were living in Rockridge.

I knew I was going to be hanging out with you guys, and then also at Lighthaven with a bunch of rationalists, but also in the city with a bunch of startup founders and AI lab people. I knew we were all going to be enmeshed in this AI boom town. The whole Bay Area is like an AI boom town right now. If you're not from that area, you may not realize this, all these trillions of dollars are flowing through the Bay Area. And it's another bubble situation like I experienced in the early 2000s, where even like the real estate prices are going up because there's so many people who got liquidity from their AI startups or big bonuses from big tech companies, and they're buying up all the real estate. So I knew we were going to be involved in this. And so my recollection is the three of us met at Lighthaven on a Sunday, maybe Sunday afternoon, and we were just going to hang out. But I had an idea that I thought, oh, well, since I knew we were going to all be attending these events and just hanging out, like we were going to be scenesters in the AI boom, that we should interview people because from a purely anthropological perspective, it's like a super interesting moment, big clash of worldviews from these different sets of people that I just described. And also, maybe there really is a story about doom that our elites, the leaders of our civilization really need to understand better, that will help them think about AI risk when it finally materializes. So that was my perspective, but maybe you can tell me what you guys are thinking on that afternoon.