Two years after he was found guilty of fraud, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is pursuing a legal appeal--and firing up his X account. On September 23, for the first time in more than six months, an X account belonging to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried published a post . It simply read, "gm"--internet slang for "good morning." The account has been posting consistently since. Bankman-Fried--known widely as SBF--is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in California.

Outside an opulent retreat in the mountains of Utah, the world is going to hell. Thanks to disinformation-spreading tools on the world's largest social media platform, people are being executed by bloodthirsty mobs and machine-gunned by their neighbors, politicians assassinated and governments crumbling. But inside Mountainhead, the billionaire tech moguls responsible for the chaos are smoking cigars and shooting the breeze, debating whether the eruption of global chaos is a crisis to be managed or a surge of "creative destruction" that will help usher humanity into a brighter future. If the fictional setting of Mountainhead, the debut feature by Jesse Armstrong, seems a little too close to reality, that's because it's meant to be. The movie, which stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith, was conceived, written, cast, shot, edited, and released in about six months, an astonishingly short timeline for any director, let alone a first-timer.

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes--the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on--and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones.

Keeping a poker face had never struck me as much of a feat--until I had to keep one. My pulse quickened, my cheeks felt flushed, and my eyes were desperate to dart and size up the pot. What had been a mediocre hand was transformed, after the flop came down, into something spectacular: every card from seven to jack--a straight. All that remained was to play it cool and build up my cash prize. The bets started small, and then grew. The next two cards looked innocuous enough.

Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals. But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried's failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost 5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property. During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the 20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the "longtermism", "rationalism" and "effective altruism" (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future. At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism. Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.

On Thursday, jurors convicted former crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding his customers out of as much as $10 billion. He will likely spend the rest of his 30s--and possibly his 40s, 50s, and 60s--in prison. The judge is expected to sentence him in March. As former confidants and close friends testified against him during his monthlong trial, Bankman-Fried's parents, Joseph and Barbara, showed up day after day to support their son, whose crypto exchange FTX imploded late last year. The Stanford Law professors' hand gestures and facial expressions played prominently into journalists' recounts of the proceedings, offering the real-life version of the cutaway shot integral to any courtroom TV show.

The tech giants that have shaped our lives, online and off, over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple all saw their valuations fall, sometimes precipitously. Many slashed their workforces; at least 120,000 tech workers lost their jobs this year. The myth of the genius founder, which insulated so many of these giants from so much criticism for so long, was debunked before our eyes. These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made--embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation--but at much greater scale, speed, and impact.

Throughout my two decades in Silicon Valley, I have seen effective altruism (EA)--a movement consisting of an overwhelmingly white male group based largely out of Oxford University and Silicon Valley--gain alarming levels of influence. EA is currently being scrutinized due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto scandal, but less has been written about how the ideology is now driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of "AI safety." EA is defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as "an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible." And "evidence and reason" have led many EAs to conclude that the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an artificially generally intelligent being (AGI) created by humans exterminates us. To prevent this apocalypse, EA's career advice center, 80,000 hours, lists "AI safety technical research" and "shaping future governance of AI" as the top two recommended careers for EAs to go into, and the billionaire EA class funds initiatives attempting to stop an AGI apocalypse.

First, we need to clear up terminology, like A.I. Safety, which sounds like a completely neutral, uncontroversial term. Who wouldn't want safe A.I. software? And you might think that the definition of A.I. "safety" would include A.I. that isn't racist or sexist or is used to abet genocide. All of which, by the way, are actual, documented concerns about today's existing A.I. software. Yet actually, none of those concerns are what A.I. researchers generally mean when they talk about "A.I. Instead, those things fall into the camp of "A.I.