It would be hard to overstate the impact that Peter Thiel has had on the career of Sam Altman. Thiel, meanwhile, became the loudest voice critiquing the lack of true technological progress amidst all the hype. And if it’s hard to exaggerate Thiel’s effect on Altman, it’s similarly easy to understate the influence that an AI-obsessed autodidact named Eliezer Yudkowsky had on Thiel’s early investments in AI. How Thiel’s conversations with Altman about DeepMind would help inspire the creation of OpenAI. We were too afraid some nutjob would pick one of them up and actually do it.”Among the many other people influenced by Vinge’s fiction was Eliezer Yudkowsky.