- I've left AI Impacts; I'm looking for jobs/projects in AI governance. I have plenty of runway; I'm looking for impact, not income. Let me know if you have suggestions!
- (Edit to clarify: I had a good experience with AI Impacts.)
- PSA about credentials (in particular, a bachelor's degree): they're important even for working in EA and AI safety.
- When I dropped out of college to work on AI safety, I thought credentials are mostly important as evidence-of-performance, for people who aren't familiar with my work, and are necessary in high-bureaucracy institutions (academia, government). It turns out that credentials are important—for working with even many people who know you (such that the credential provides no extra evidence) and are willing to defy conventions—for rational, optics-y reasons. It seems even many AI governance professionals/orgs are worried (often rationally) about appearing unserious by hiring or publicly-collaborating-with the uncredentialed, or something. Plus irrationally-credentialist organizations are very common/important, and may even comprise a substantial fraction of EA jobs and x-risk-focused AI governance jobs (which I expected to be more convention-defying), and sometimes an organization/institution is credentialist even when it's led by weird AI safety people (those people operate under constraints).
- Disclaimer: the evidence-from-my-experiences for these claims is pretty weak. This point's epistemic status is more considerations + impressions from a few experiences than facts/PSA.
- Upshot: I'd caution people against dropping out of college to increase impact unless they have a great plan.
- (Edit to clarify: this paragraph is not about AI Impacts — it's about everyone else.)
- When I dropped out of college to work on AI safety, I thought credentials are mostly important as evidence-of-performance, for people who aren't familiar with my work, and are necessary in high-bureaucracy institutions (academia, government). It turns out that credentials are important—for working with even many people who know you (such that the credential provides no extra evidence) and are willing to defy conventions—for rational, optics-y reasons. It seems even many AI governance professionals/orgs are worried (often rationally) about appearing unserious by hiring or publicly-collaborating-with the uncredentialed, or something. Plus irrationally-credentialist organizations are very common/important, and may even comprise a substantial fraction of EA jobs and x-risk-focused AI governance jobs (which I expected to be more convention-defying), and sometimes an organization/institution is credentialist even when it's led by weird AI safety people (those people operate under constraints).
Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday.
My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign.
If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly about my normal longtermist c3 recommendations.
Some friends and I have nonpublic recommendations less good than Bores but ~4x as good as the normal longtermist c3s above, according to me.
As one of Zach's collaborators, I endorse these recommendations. If I had to choose among the 501c3s listed above, I'd choose Forethought first and the Midas Project second, but these are quite weakly held opinions.
I do recommend reaching out about nonpublic recommendations if you're likely to give over $20k!
Why can’t they take Good Ventures’ money?
Also, are these all longtermist organizations, or AGI near-tearmist organizations?
My understanding is METR doesn't take Good Ventures money to avoid the appearance of COIs. We could maybe avoid creating actual COIs but it is crucial to the business model to appear as trusted and neutral as possible.
What's the risk of an appearance that there's a COI? Is it that Dustin Moskovitz is an Anthropic investor?
Regarding COIs, it's probably bigger that Daniela is married to Holden, and while not strictly a COI, we don't want the association with OP's political advocacy. There are probably other things, I'm don't work on strategy
Curious why METR. This is less METR specific and more about capabilities benchmarks: Doesn't frontier capabilities benchmarking help accelerate ai development? I know they also do pure safety but in practice I feel like they have done more to push forth the agentic autmation race.