Cross post, adapted for LessWrong

Several challenges add friction to finding high signal people and literature:

High status may negatively impact signal.
Exploration can only be done at the edges of my network, e.g. Twitter thread interactions or recommended people to follow, bottlenecked by I don’t know what I don’t know.
Recommendations naturally bias toward popular people.
Even recommended people from a curated following list may be important but low signal, e.g. Sam Altman’s priority is promoting OpenAI products.
Validation - is this information valuable? - is manual vibe check.

We reapply PageRank to Twitter, which naturally weights “important” people higher. If Ilya Sutskever follows only three accounts, a puppy fan page among them, perhaps we should sit up and take notice. The approach is very similar to the existing LessWrong work analyzing AI discourse on Twitter/Bluesky, but instead of categorizing p(doom) discourse, we want to find "important" and “underrated” people.

Approach:

Find important people in the AI Twitter sphere via PageRank
Find the “underrated” people with low follow count from step 1.
Find consistently “high signal” people from step 1 via an LLM.

Six 'famous' users were used to bootstrap PageRank, chosen for high quality public contributions. After a round of convergence, the top ranked handle is added (removing organizations), repeating until we have ~200 "core" handles. Finally, we cut the list down to top 749 and rerun one last time. The full table with additional columns can be found at https://thefourierproject.org/people

Andrej Karpathy, @karpathy, Eureka Labs/Education
Dwarkesh Patel, @dwarkesh_sp, Various topics podcasts
Lilian Weng, @lilian_weng, Thinking Machines/AI safety
Chris Olah, @ch402, Anthropic/AI safety
Dylan Patel, @dylan522p, SemiAnalysis
Eric Jang, @ericjang11, 1X Robotics

"Influential" People

Let’s look at the results! Unsurprisingly, Sam Altman is rank 0, clearly a center of gravity in the field, with other famous people trailing. How do the original 6 rank?

Andrej Karpathy (1)
Dwarkesh Patel (17)
Lilian Weng (46)
Chris Olah (34)
Dylan Patel (174)
Eric Jang (93)

We can also see some well known LessWrong members also in the untruncated ~60,000 list (rankings slightly different).

Ajeya Cotra @ajeya_cotra (194)
Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo (123)
Eli Lifland @Eli_lifland (1153)

"Underrated" People

"Underrated" handle...

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