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Definitely a unique take on EA!!
Curated and popular this week
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...
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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...
Summary:
First, I give several different angles on how I feel about reinforcement learning:
* Theoretical case: RL is a black-box source of agency — this should give us classic misalignment worries, especially compared to agency-via-scaffolding
* Recent incidents (huggingface etc) and more mundane forms of misaligned behaviour in personal use give me bad vibes about the direction-of-travel of recent AI progress
* I’m worried things might get worse:...
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Thanks for this! I agree the NT puts severe moral weight on care for the poor. Matthew 25 should make any “faith” that never expresses itself in works of mercy look suspect.
Where I think your post is slightly theologically dangerous is in treating salvation a bit like a checklist of criteria humans can meet. The NT is equally clear that none of us meets God’s standard: “None is righteous… no one seeks for God” (Rom 3:10–12), and Jesus’ demand is perfection (Matt 5:48). On that basis, no one is saved.
That’s why the cross matters: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Salvation is by grace, received through faith, “not a result of works” (Eph 2:8–9). Jesus’ core call is “Repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15); “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). Repentance is turning from self-rule toward God's will, and when it’s real it produces fruit (like service to the poor).
So in Matthew 25 the point isn’t “earn salvation by helping the poor,” but that lack of mercy can reveal a life where one claims to be a follower of God but is actually untouched by repentance and grace. Works don’t save, but the absence of transformed living exposes false faith.
P.S. clarifications, since these terms carry baggage:
By “repentance,” I mean a genuine turning away from what is wrong and toward what is good. In Christian terms, it’s a real choice, though one Christians think is enabled by grace. If that turn is real, it shows up in changed direction over time. If you “turned” but never moved, it’s fair to question whether you turned at all.
By “God,” and "God's will" I mean the God Christians claim is most clearly revealed in Jesus Christ, not a capricious or vengeful deity, but one who wills perfect love and justice. The Christian story ends with the defeat of death and suffering (Rev 21:4). That vision overlaps in important ways with many effective altruist concerns about reducing suffering and caring for the vulnerable, even if the underlying metaphysics differ.