A former Google engineer and the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic, is behind the Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley.

At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It’s like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” …

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    7 months ago

    HN discovers this article, almost a day later (laggards): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38500192

    A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon

    A particularly creepy doxxing by Forbes…

    Oh no, are the tools developed by SV startups being used for stuff you don’t like? How sad HN.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      7 months ago

      I don’t want to libel the author by claiming the piece was planted by Beff himself, but what’s more likely, this writer who mostly covers what’s trending on tiktok gets a big scoop using voice recognition on a twitter space and then writes a glowing dossier? Or beff got on the phone with a publicist and conjured a big reveal with a softball interview all while namedropping his new startup?

      extremely funny that they think this article makes him look good. also extremely funny that they think this is a big scoop

    • skillissuerEnglish
      8·
      7 months ago

      Oh no, are the tools developed by SV startups being used for stuff you don’t like? How sad HN.

      tormenting the torment nexus. heh, how the turntables