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...
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...
A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, ...
We are running out of Helium.
There's lots of helium in the solar system. You could harvest the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn for it. Obviously this has an energy cost, but s stated in the article energy is the only real resource that we use up. Everything else is renewable.
In what sense? The problem of potential helium scarcity has been (effectively) solved in the last few years by just looking for more helium deposits.
In a sense, we are "running out" (because there's only a finite supply of Helium), we're just running out very, very slowly.