"The robots were fully invented and designed by us to effectively navigate the stratosphere. In many ways it’s an environment that is closer to Mars than Earth. The robot itself essentially operates as a robotic arm. We have a device with very intricate guidance, navigation, and control that is able to stabilize and capture very high resolution details—we can see a detail the size of a baseball from 100,000 feet."

“The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years—but it’s certainly a small world. Everyone is hopelessly mixed up in everyone else’s life, which would be messy but basically unremarkable if not for the colossal sums of money involved. Anthropic received a half-billion-dollar investment from the cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, shortly before he was arrested on fraud charges. Open Philanthropy, a foundation distributing the fortune of the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, has funded nearly every A.I.-safety initiative; it also gave thirty million dollars to OpenAI in 2017, and got one board seat. (At the time, the head of Open Philanthropy was living with Christiano, employing Christiano’s future wife, and engaged to Daniela Amodei, an OpenAI employee who later co-founded Anthropic.) “It’s an absolute clusterfuck,” an employee at an organization funded by Open Philanthropy told me. “I brought up once what their conflict-of-interest policy was, and they just laughed.” (The New Yorker)