Behind the Scenes of the AI Celebration at the World’s End

In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a gathering of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists convened to explore the potential fate of humanity.

The Sunday afternoon event, titled “Worthy Successor,” centered around an intriguing concept proposed by entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: the “moral aim” of advanced AI should be to establish a form of intelligence so profound and enlightened that “you would willingly prefer that it (not humanity) decide the future trajectory of life itself.”

Faggella clarified the theme in his invitation. “This event profoundly addresses posthuman transition,” he conveyed to me through X DMs. “It’s not about AGI that perpetually serves as a tool for humanity.”

An event steeped in futuristic ideals, where participants deliberate the end of humanity as a logistical challenge rather than a metaphorical one, might seem niche. However, for those residing in San Francisco and working in AI, this represents a standard Sunday.

Approximately 100 attendees sipped nonalcoholic cocktails and enjoyed cheese plates by the expansive windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean before coming together to listen to three presentations on the future of intelligence. One participant wore a shirt emblazoned with “Kurzweil was right,” presumably referencing futurist Ray Kurzweil, who forecasted that machines would outstrip human intelligence in the coming years. Another donned a shirt questioning, “does this help us achieve safe AGI?” accompanied by a thinking face emoji.

Faggella mentioned to WIRED that he organized this gathering because “the major labs, those aware that AGI could end humanity, refrain from discussing it as the incentives discourage it.” He recalled earlier remarks from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who “were all quite open about the potential for AGI to bring about our downfall.” Now, as the impetus shifts towards competition, he states, “they’re all pushing hard to develop it.” (Fairly speaking, Musk continues to address the threats posed by advanced AI, though this hasn’t stopped his aggressive pursuit).

On LinkedIn, Faggella proudly showcased an impressive guest list, including AI founders, researchers from top Western AI labs, and “most of the significant philosophical voices on AGI.”

The first speaker, Ginevera Davis, a New York-based writer, cautioned that human values might be untranslatable to AI. She asserted that machines may never truly grasp what consciousness entails, suggesting that efforts to hard-code human preferences into future systems could be short-sighted. Instead, she introduced a high-minded concept termed “cosmic alignment”—creating AI capable of seeking deeper, more universal values that we have yet to uncover. Her presentation featured images of a seemingly AI-generated techno-utopia, showcasing a group of humans on a grassy knoll overlooking a futuristic city.

Skeptics of machine consciousness argue that large language models are simply stochastic parrots—a phrase introduced by several researchers, some from Google, who claimed in a notable paper that LLMs do not truly comprehend language and function purely as probabilistic systems. However, that discourse wasn’t part of the symposium, where speakers accepted the notion of impending superintelligence as a given.