Back in January, I had a conversation with someone named Daniel Moreno-Gama. He was a 19-year-old Texan with a part-time job, taking classes at a community college. He was worried about AI, and what he saw as the impending extinction of humanity.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because this week he was charged with attempting to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In the early hours of Friday morning, authorities say, he hurled a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. He then allegedly traveled to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn the building down.
Months earlier, my colleagues and I had found Moreno-Gama on a Discord server called Stop AI, where he was posting under the username Butlerian Jihadist (apparently he is a Dune fan). We were reporting an episode of our podcast series The Last Invention, where we’ve been documenting the debates around the attempt to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the digital supermind that the leading AI labs believe may profoundly change human life forever.
In our series, we’ve been attempting to cover all sides and all the beliefs shaping our world’s view of this fascinating, bewildering technological moment. In these debates, Moreno-Gama belonged to a small but hard-line camp: His posts suggested he believed that the time had come to use violence to stop AGI. In a post on Discord that caught our attention, he asked the group whether he would get banned for talking about violence.
(courtesy of author)
One of our reporters DMed him asking him to elaborate, and he said he was interested in “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs.”
