Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
148
BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
Public service announcement
1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
Recent opportunities to take action
We just launched a free, self-paced course: Worldbuilding Hopeful Futures with AI, created by Foresight Institute as part of our Existential Hope program.
The course is probably not breaking new conceptual ground for folks here who are already “red-pilled” on AI risks — but it might still be of interest for a few reasons:
It’s designed to broaden the base of people engaging with long-term AI trajectories, including governance, institutional design, and alignment concerns.
It uses worldbuilding as an accessible gateway for newcomers — especially those who aren’t in technical fields but still want to understand and shape AI’s future.
We’re inviting contributions from more experienced thinkers as well — to help seed more diverse, plausible, and strategically relevant futures that can guide better public conversations.
Guest lectures include:
Helen Toner (CSET, former OpenAI board) on frontier lab dynamics
Anton Korinek (Brookings) on economic impact of AI
Anthony Aguirre (FLI) on existential risk
Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data) on grounded progress
Glen Weyl (RadicalxChange) on plural governance
Ada Palmer (historian & sci-fi author) on long-range thinking
If you’re involved in outreach, education, or mentoring, this might be a good resource to share. And if you're curious about how we’re trying to translate these issues to a wider audience — or want to help build out more compelling positive-world scenarios — we’d love your input.
👉 https://www.udemy.com/course/worldbuilding-hopeful-futures-with-ai/
Would love feedback or questions — and happy to incorporate critiques into the next iteration.