Sam Bankman-Fried funded the effective-altruist movement. Ever since the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, the philanthropic movement’s signal fund has to sell its assets to pay back his victims.
It is plainly obvious to everyone that if you’re going to save the world, one of the first things you have to do is buy a 550-year-old British castle near the University of Oxford for about $15 million. This was the logic in 2021 when members of the so-called Effective Altruism movement’s signature institution bought a posh, 25-bedroom residence called Wytham Abbey as a place to have conferences and stage other various intellectual frolics. (Many of its most prominent members also went to Oxford.) This castle, previously owned by the Earl of Abingdon and later bequeathed to the university, would be the place where they could think deeply about ways to protect the future of humanity, particularly from the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Since buying the property, however, it’s turned out that that was not really so obviously a good idea, and the EA movement has been severely damaged by the collapse and criminal conviction of its most prominent backer, Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, Wytham Abbey is for sale (asking price: $20 million) as the EA movement struggles to pay back money that was stolen from Bankman-Fried’s victims. It has also, weirdly, become a meme in a very dumb Silicon Valley culture war.
First, it is worth noting that even people within the EA movement thought that the castle was a bad idea. Effective altruism, after all, is all about the efficient use of money — arguing that the most important long-term thing someone can do is to make as much money as possible in order to give it away. But to the leadership of Effective Ventures Foundation, the movement’s flagship nonprofit organization, it was a way to more effectively spread all their ideas. “Having an immersive environment which was more about exploring new ideas than showing off results was just very good for intellectual progress,” said Owen Cotton-Barratt, one of the EAs who claimed to have been involved in the purchase. It was around this time that the EA movement became preoccupied with artificial intelligence as a threat to continued existence of humanity, and had focused its intellectual firepower on stopping the world from descending into a Matrix-like hellscape.
Since the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, however, the EA movement has suffered a tremendous collapse in relevance and credibility. The criminal trial of Bankman-Fried showed how the fraudster used the logic of EA to justify defrauding millions of people out of their money. “He said he thought that rules like ‘don’t lie’ and ‘don’t steal’ didn’t fit into that framework,” Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and former CEO of his hedge fund, testified. In fact, there appears to have been a lot of opulent spending from the EA movement that seems hard to justify when it’s exposed to broader scrutiny.
To be clear, the money to buy the castle came from Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook co-founder, not SBF. But the EA movement’s nonprofit was so entangled with the crypto fraud that that doesn’t really matter at this point. The U.K. government launched an investigation into the Effective Ventures Foundation following the collapse of FTX, and it’s now scrambling to pay back about $27 million that was donated by SBF — but was, in fact, money that belonged to his victims.
In light of SBF’s tremendous duplicity, whatever veneer of legitimacy that the EA movement had for the purchase has utterly collapsed. And the enemies of EA — calling themselves effective accelerationists, and preaching that AI advancement should be celebrated, not regulated — have not wasted any time delighting in it.
In a weird twist, what was arguably more damaging to the EA movement than SBF’s conviction was the November firing of another tech giant — Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI. In November, when Altman was abruptly fired from the company, it exposed how the company was governed by a group of EAs who viewed Altman as a threat. The reasons at the time were murky, and led to wild speculation about runaway technology, but last month Altman was restored to the board after an internal investigation found that it had more to do with personal gripes than some imminent doomsday scenario. The EAs who were on OpenAI’s board have stepped down, and the skeptics running the world’s most important AI company are now outnumbered. This only emboldened the effective accelerationists, who believe that AI technology will eventually usher in a new era of human evolution. Among those accelerationists is billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who’s joked about buying the castle as a kind of trophy.
Look, all of this is very sci-fi and pushed by people who make wrong predictions all the time. In the end, the big, expensive castle is a strange folly by nerds who had too much money, and now another group of nerds who didn’t like them might buy it. Maybe they’ll turn it into a hospital where you can get your Elon Musk brain chips surgically implanted into your cerebral cortex. I hope they do!
