Anthropic just released its S-1 form, which contains the official financial information it must report to the SEC in order to go public. From the S-1, we now know that Anthropic's revenue grew more than 100x (specifically, 112x) from 2023 to 2025. Revenue was:
A few people in the EA community apparently believe this revenue growth rate will continue for the next several years at least. However, I am confident we won't see Anthropic bring in $514 billion in revenue in 2027, which is what extrapolation would imply.
Indeed, I'm confident that Anthropic won't hit half of what extrapolation would imply, which is $257 billion in 2027.
I'm willing to bet as much and would be delighted to wager $20 on it, to be donated to the charity of the winner's choice.
I also have an open offer for a more general AI bubble bet.
PauseAI UK is holding a March Against AI Extinction on 21st November.
It will be the largest demonstration for AI safety in the world, by a substantial margin. I really hope that almost everyone in the London AI safety community will be there. If you know people in the UK, please ask them to go.
I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.
Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :
Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades.
I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:
I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:
I've been chatting to Vasco via email about this. I guess I'll import some of my critiques here.
I feel like Brian's right that consciousness has some fuzzy edges (maybe it's a combination of many hard-to-recognise-in-isolation subphenomena), but his actual takes on this and most other philosophical subjects seem to me to reduce to an equivocation between nihilism and extreme egoism - they always seem to boil down to 'what "I" (the author) "care" about' as some kind of acceptance test. In the case of consciousness, this seems like you could understand it in a couple of ways, neither of which seem very informative to the reader:
Brian subsequently wrote the essay My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which I think (though Vasco disagrees) basically contradicts this one.
Though to do that I need to digress into an extended caveat that any purported contradiction comes with the caveat that on interpretation two, Brian's words and all words are referentless. At the very least, if we abandon the notion of consciousness, I think we most likely lose our entire vocabulary of non-physically-descriptive nouns, including but not limited to
(not to say I would miss all of these) (also heads up so it doesn't catch Vasco off guard, I added a couple of key ones since our email discussion)
And I think Vasco is arguing for interpretation two. So if so I think there's no discussion to be had - we are both just flapping our meat. It might turn out somehow that one of us counterfactually changes their behaviour if in range of the others' meat-flapping, but we can't ascribe that to causality - since that's a non-physically-descriptive noun - and we certainly can't ascribe it to anything like semantic properties of the words.
So I have to proceed by assuming that the first interpretation was correct, or that I somehow misunderstand the nature of the absence of consciousness, which is a strange position to be in. Perhaps Vasco can help me understand a different way of 'thinking about' it, but I am sceptical.
On this first-and-a-halfth interpretation Brian has gone from defining consciousness as 'thing Brian cares about' to 'we need to know what other things have raw feelings'. If the first essay were correct, 'need' wouldn't mean much, and if it did, the answer would be 'whatever things Brian cares about'. So perhaps Brian is saying there he anticipates caring about future things and cares about that anticipation. But learning information about the world couldn't give him information about other consciousnesses, because that information would be entirely contained within the stochastic process of him caring about things or not.
In the latter essay, Brian writes:
Reductionism: The world ultimately reduces to physics—quarks, leptons, etc., or probably something else more fundamental. "Consciousness" is not one of those physical primitives. Thus, consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon—a process that involves many parts working together in various ways. But if consciousness is emergent, then it must have fuzzy boundaries just like any concept does. There's no "true essence" underlying an emergent phenomenon. It just is what its components are, and we decide the boundaries of labeling which emergent phenomena belong to which categories that we make up. Consciousness must be like this.
Which Vasco approves of. I think these claims are far too confident:
Ultimately I think that consciousness, despite being a philosophical black box and a neuroscientifically grey one, is too powerful a high level theory to abandon without a much more solid replacement. If you were to put me on a rack for long enough, I would recant the positions I'm arguing for here. But my prior explanation of why I would recant refers to a relatively simple, localisable statement that some -currently but not inevitably hard to specify - measurable quantity had gone negative, and that 'caused' my action.
I won't put words into Vasco's mouth, but I wonder whether he thinks there's a way of describing that process without using 'reference classes' that's simpler than '{full mathematical derivation that} that's the all the interacting fields and forces in that local area'.
I also want to ask Vasco how he can be confident that, even if it's true that he has no consciousness (and it does seem to be a contingent and disablable property in humans), that lack of a light would generalise to those of us who profess to have one.
I'd always understood instrumental convergence as the claim about what is useful for achieving goals rather than a claim about what models would inevitably do: i.e. that seizing power and resource is useful towards virtually any goal. I know people went on to claim this implied actual AIs would pursue power and resources fanatically, but strictly speaking, I thought that was meant to be a likely consequence of "instrumental convergence" and not "instrumental convergence" itself. This is all based on my memory of reading Bostrom >10 years ago though, so I could be wrong.
Thanks for sharing this opportunity!
I found a few more EA-aligned animal welfare organizations that appear eligible based on Every.org's official criteria:
Aiming to finalise plans for Giving Season this week. I'm not running a donation election (for reasons I'll explain in the announcement), which gives us some more space to focus directly on having important conversations to do with funding and resource allocation in the movement.
I'll run a marginal funding week (week starting 16 Nov - message me if you'd like to take part), and a debate week (planning it for week starting Nov 30). I reckon I have capacity for two more themed weeks, as well as AMAs etc...
What would you like to see us run over Giving Season?