Thiel describing a 2024 conversation with Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, where Elon is saying “I’m working on going to mars, it’s the most important project in the world” and Demis argues “actually my project is the most important in the world; my superintelligence will change everything, and it will follow you to mars”. (This is in the context of Thiel’s long pivot from libertarianism to a darker strain of conservativism / neoreaction, having realized that that “there’s nowhere else to go” to escape mainstream culture/civilization, that you can’t escape to outer space, cyberspace, or the oceans as he once hoped, but can only stay and fight to sieze control of the one future (hence all these musings about carl schmidtt and etc that make me feel wary he is going to be egging on J D Vance to try and auto-coup the government).
FTR: while Thiel has already claimed this version before, the more common version (e.g. here, here, here from Hassabis’ mouth, and more obliquely here in his lawsuit against Altman) is that Hassabis was warning Musk about existential risk from unaligned AGI, not threatening him with his own personally aligned AGI. However, this interpretation is interestingly resonant with Elon Musk’s creation of OpenAI being motivated by fear of Hassabis becoming an AGI dictator (a fear his co-founders apparently shared). It is certainly an interesting hypothesis that Thiel and Musk engineered together for a decade both the AGI race and global democratic backsliding wholly motivated by a same single one-sentence possible slight by Hassabis in 2012.