alt Hacker NewsA lot of SV is tied to the Effective Altruism scene. It kind of has to be. If you make absolutely insane amounts of money with anti-consumer and legally-grey business practices, you have to somehow justify what you're doing. Since no one likes identifying themselves as a slimy businessperson with a potential personality disorder, they look for positive ways to frame it.
There's really no redeeming that area at this point.
This is getting causation backwards. Effective Altruism was a relatively small scene that attracted some people who understood the importance of AI early. It’s not all that surprising that some of those people went on to start AI labs later.
You can make a conspiracy out of it, but it’s sort of like thinking people who met in school had it all planned out from the beginning.