Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice.
Typically their motivation is either that (a) they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building, or (b) they think an ecosystem needs more new projects generally to absorb more talent and deploy more funding effectively.
Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious...
You can run your own events!
(Inspired by recent discussions about exclusivity of events run by CEA.)
It is possible to run your own events, including a conference with goals similar to the EAG and EAGx event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism.
I personally think the EAG event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism is pretty great, and that the space of EAG-like events is probably far from saturated. Here are some brief pointers to arguments, which I'm happy to expand on if anyone is interested:
- competitive markets for attendance/attention lead to diversity / positive-sum differentiation
- more is better (put differently, the market is labor-constrained) -- if individuals think attending your conference will add value for them, then you probably add value overall by running it
- different people may have different advantages in their organizing ability. If you live in Africa, then your understanding, connections, and legal status in your city and country make are valuable edge in the project of running a geographically African conference.