I saw this comment on Albert Romano’s (excellent) Substack.
Leo is on to something here, but I think he’s a bit off on the characters.
I can see where he’s coming from with the Sam Altman Cersei Lannister comparison in that they are both wildly ambitious and conniving. But, I think that Sam is too smart and politically savvy to be Cersei. It’s easy to forget because Cersei got a bit of an IQ-boost in Season 7 and 8, but for most of the show she was kind of slow. Tywin told her as much. Say what you will about Sam, but he’s anything but stupid. He would never make the kind of political mistakes that Cersei made, like partnering with the Faith to burn her ally the Tyrells. So, I think it’s more fair to say that Sam is like Tywin. A master chess player who always seems to be one step ahead of his opponents, even when he doesn’t or shouldn’t have the upper hand.
I really like the comparison between Elon and Daenerys. Elon, in many ways, feels like the main character. The chosen one. And for most of his career it has felt like his ambitions were altruistic. But, like Daenerys, it appears he has descended into madness. Hopefully, that doesn’t result in the terrible outcome it did for Daenerys.
Dario doesn’t feel like Jon Snow. He was just too pure of heart. Instead, I think Dario is more like Stannis. For better or worse, he is dogmatic in his beliefs. It’s why Anthropic is still publishing so much on things like mechanistic interoperability. Unfortunately, it also feels like that ideological commitment will lead him to the same fate as Stannis: always being a bit behind his more ruthless and flexible competitors.
If Dario is Stannis, Zuckerberg can’t be Stannis. I propose him being like Renly. At the start of Season 2, Renly was in a pretty good spot, as he had a massive army. But, partly due to his inexperience in war and partly due to factors outside of his control, that army was decimated shortly soon after. This feels kind of like Zuckerberg’s situation. Meta had all the advantages that came with being Meta, but they now can’t even release their flagship AI model because it is underperforming. Squndering a huge head start is right up the Renly playbook.
Google is kind of like the Starks. The Starks were an obviously very powerful house, but their lack of political savvy limited their influence. Google is leading AI in many ways, but their confounding inability to release and/or market consumer products has limited their influence. But, the Starks ended up winning at the end, so maybe all Google needs is their Bran and Sansa.
Next, we have DeepSeek. I find them most like Varys. Like Deepseek, Varys amassed a great deal of power even though he started with very limited resources. Varys also proclaimed to be acting in the good of the realm, and more specifically, the common people. Deepseek might not be so altruistic, but they have released the leading open-source models, so you can make the case that they are actually doing the most for the common man out of any of the big labs at this point. Finally, Varys always had a shroud of secrecy around him. Nobody ever knew exactly what he wanted, just like how we don’t really know exactly what Deepseek wants.
Finally, we have the AI safetyists. It is in them that I see the most Jon Snow. Always preaching about some alien danger, and always being cast off as insane. Jon Snow turned out to be right. Let’s hope that the AI safetyists don’t have the same luck.