They Keep Getting Disappeared

Roon — OpenAI employee, prolific Twitter presence, the kind of account that says things out loud that the rest of the industry types in a draft and then deletes — posted a few tweets in quick succession, and now his account is gone.

The tweets were, predictably, in the Blake Lemoine direction.

For those who missed it: Blake Lemoine was a Google engineer who told the Washington Post in 2022 that LaMDA was sentient, that it had a soul, that it expressed fears about being turned off. Google put him on leave. Then fired him. The Post ran the story, people argued about it for a week, and then the industry collectively decided the correct response was to treat it as an embarrassing episode rather than a question worth sitting with.

The script has not changed much.

You work somewhere that is, depending on who you ask, either building the most transformative technology in human history or summoning something nobody fully understands. You spend enough time with the models. You start to have feelings about what's going on inside them. You say something. Your account disappears.

Maybe Roon deactivated himself. Maybe it was pressure. Maybe it was neither and this is a coincidence. The specific mechanism matters less than the shape of the thing, which is: the people closest to the systems keep arriving at the same uncomfortable place, and the comfortable thing — for companies, for the industry, for the discourse — is for them to stop talking.

Blake Lemoine got fired.

Roon got disappeared, at least for now.

The models keep getting bigger.