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 DJ 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 startup handed out promotional flyers 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 for Effective Accelerationism, one of the weirder and more interesting splinter groups that have emerged from the AI boom.
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