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This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
TL;DR
Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
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TL;DR: I'm releasing a website that ranks philanthropists according to EA principles and research, and allows users to re-rank the list using their own assumptions. I'd like feedback and help making it better. I'd especially like ideas for how to make the results more trustworthy. Funding may be available.
I recently built Impact List (impactlist.xyz), a site which ranks people by their positive impact via donations.
The goal is t...
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I worked at OpenAI for three years, from 2021-2024 on the Alignment team, which eventually became the Superalignment team. I worked on scalable oversight, part of the team developing critiques as a technique for using language models to spot mistakes in other language models. I then worked to refine an idea from Nick Cammarata into a method for using language model to generate explanations for features in language models. I was then promoted to managing a team of 4 people which worked on trying to understand language model features in context, leading to the release of an open source "transformer debugger" tool.
I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.
FWIW on timelines:
Thank you for your work there. I’m curious about what made you resign, and also about why you’ve chosen now to communicate that?
(I expect that you are under some form of NDA, and that if you were willing and able to talk about why you resigned then you would have done so in your initial post. Therefore, for readers interested in some possibly related news: last month, Daniel Kokotajlo quit OpenAI’s Futures/Governance team “due to losing confidence that it [OpenAI] would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” and a Superalignment researcher was forced out of OpenAI in what may have been a political firing (source). OpenAI appears to be losing its most safety-conscious people.)
Hi William! Thanks for posting. Can you elaborate on your motivation for posting this Quick Take?
No comment.
Presumably NDA + forbidden to talk about the NDA (hence forbidden to talk about being forbidden to talk about ... )