Big Tech
Article
Big Tech is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 10, 2024 and February 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “AI doomers are willing to stand up to Big Tech”; “Bhattacharya’s contrarian COVID positions provoked censorship and harassment from Big Tech”. It most often appears alongside COVID, 1DaySooner, 80,000 Hours.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: October 10, 2024
- Last seen: February 07, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- @GroundHogStrat (1 shared issues)
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- A.I. salons (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam McKay (1 shared issues)
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- ADUs (1 shared issues)
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- al-Qaeda (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Tabarrok (1 shared issues)
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- Alphabet (1 shared issues)
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- Andreessen Horowitz (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Ron Conway is one of Newsom’s closest allies and biggest donors. In 2021, after Newsom broke his own COVID rules to go to a fancy dinner, some Californians tried to him recalled (ie got votes to hold a special election to impeach the governor). Conway (net worth $1.5 billion) helped coordinate Big Tech around opposing the recall and personally donated $200K to the anti-recall campaign; he apparently lobbied against the bill, and plausibly leads the list of people the Governor owes favors to.
…to maybe slightly threatening. A frequent theme was that some form of AI regulation was inevitable. SB 1047 - a light-touch bill designed by Silicon-Valley-friendly moderates - was the best deal that Big Tech was ever going to get, and they went full scorched-earth to oppose it. Next time, the deal will be designed by anti-tech socialists, it’ll be much worse, and nobody will feel sorry for them.
But I think an equally big change is that SB 1047 has proven that AI doomers are willing to stand up to Big Tech. Socialists previously accused us of being tech company stooges, harping on the dangers of AI as a sneaky way of hyping it up. I admit I dismissed those accusations as part of a strategy of slinging every possible insult at us to see which ones stuck. But maybe they actually believed it. Maybe it was their real barrier to working with us, and maybe - now that we’ve proven we can (grudgingly, tentatively, when absolutely forced) oppose (some) Silicon Valley billionaires, they’ll be willing to at least treat us as potential allies of convenience.
Bhattacharya is a rare doctor and medical professor who also has a PhD in economics. His contrarian COVID positions provoked censorship and harassment from Big Tech and the academic establishment; the experience seems to have low-key traumatized him, and his preliminary policy proposals, listed here, focus on using the NIH's grant-giving power to shake up the orthodoxy that wanted him silenced. Here are some other policies we hope he’ll look into:
Inline links: listed here