# Effective altruists saw AI coming before it was mainstream

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/effective-altruists-saw-ai-coming-before-it-was-mainstream/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Peter Thiel](https://realalpha.app/people/peter-thiel/) · Peter Thiel is cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, investor. · Co-founded PayPal and Palantir, was Facebook's first outside investor, and co-founded Founders Fund.
- Host: [Walter Isaacson](https://realalpha.app/people/walter-isaacson/) · Host, The Builders
- Show: The Builders with Walter Isaacson
- Episode: [Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/), Oct 22, 2026
- Moment: 5:03 to 9:05 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/effective-altruists-saw-ai-coming-before-it-was-mainstream/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=303

## Quote

> “And the way I would steel man the effect of altruists is, first off, they got **one enormously big thing right**.”
> — [Peter Thiel](https://realalpha.app/people/peter-thiel/) at [7:39](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=459) · The Builders with Walter Isaacson

## Takeaways

1. Bay Area futurists discussed AI before it became a mainstream concern.
2. Thiel says hardware progress made AI seem closer despite an AI winter.
3. He credits the movement with recognizing AI’s potential early.

## About this segment

Peter Thiel traces Bay Area futurists’ interest in AI back to the 2000s. He credits their foresight while acknowledging what he sees as cult-like traits in the movement.

From “Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think”, Oct 22, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/)

## Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

[5:09](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=309) Wait, explain that because people are now saying it's sort of a psyops or David Sacks says. conspiracy theory of effective altruism. And I think even people like me vaguely know what Sam Bankman Free was on about. Well, you don't get that. Tell me about that.

[5:23](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=323) Well, there's a lot of history, but even if you go back to the 2000s in the East Bay of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places, it wasn't where the big tech companies were being built, but there was sort of a creativity with ideas. It was a little bit adjacent to the new atheists, you know, how could you be more reasonable, rational? Where was the world heading? And the one big idea that these sort of futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps something like AI could happen, that perhaps it was closer than people thought.

[6:00](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=360) There had been an AI desert for a long time. It had been over-promised for many decades. But on the other hand, Moore's law was still progressing. The computers were relentlessly getting more powerful. And perhaps it was not a question of necessarily a much better algorithm. Perhaps it was just almost a hardware problem that once you got the chips and the computers that were powerful enough, it would be more likely that something like this would happen. And then that this would be a very, very big thing when it happened, that this would be an enormously socially transformative thing. It was potentially very dangerous. It could be maybe it could be weaponized. Maybe there were these science fiction scenarios where the AI would almost become autonomous. So there were very many different kinds of scenarios. And then

[6:47](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=407) there were, of course, parts of it that were, I don't know, crazy and almost cult-like. But it had maybe the good dimension of a cult where there was one big thing they knew that the other people did not. And I think even though there are ways I'd like to be very critical of them today, there were ways they got that one big thing right. And then, you know, has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic.

[7:11](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=431) Even a billion-dollar company seems like bigger than a crazed cult could build. So if you have a cult that's built a company that's worth probably close to $ 2 trillion at the IPO, it would probably be the, I don't know, sixth, seventh largest company by market cap in the world, built in like six, seven years. Has a cult ever done something like that? So yes, I want to be critical of them, and they're things I'm uncomfortable and critical about.

[7:37](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=457) But the first thing I would try to do is always, you always want to steel man your opponents. You want to try to understand them as well as they understand themselves or even make their arguments better. And the way I would steel man the effect of altruists is, first off, they got one enormously big thing right. And that one enormously big thing was? AI is around the corner.

[7:56](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=476) But also that it could become misaligned with human values? The way AI was classically defined, let's say. There were all these different definitions of AI, of course. It could be just sort of machine learning and sort of like maybe cameras everywhere or something like that. It's a sort of totalitarian AI that you have in China. Or it could be this sort of super-duper AI with a godlike intelligence or something, which was sort of the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy. But the in-between version of AI was not that it would be this dumb surveillance cameras, not that it would be godlike. but they would be like a human being. That had been the AI test. The Turing test from the beginning was, it's not that it is a human being, but that it can fool you into thinking it's a person. And from the outputs, you

[8:47](https://realalpha.app/v/H9Bdv3t5VtQ/?t=527) can't tell the difference. Yeah, that's going to be a very, very big deal. And it raises all sorts of, you know, raises even basic economics questions. Is it an economic compliment to people? Is it a substitute for people?