Comments
Yudkowsky's message is "If anyone builds superintelligence, everyone dies." Zvi's version is "If anyone builds superintelligence under anything like current conditions, everyone probably dies."
Yudkowsky contrasts those framings with common "EA framings" like "It seems hard to predict whether superintelligence will kill everyone or not, but there's a worryingly high chance it will, and Earth isn't prepared," and seems to think the latter framing is substantially driven by concerns about what can be said "in polite company."
Obviously I can't speak for all of EA, or all of Open Phil, and this post is my personal view rather than an institutional one since no single institutional view exists, but for the record, my inside view since 2010 has been "If anyone builds superintelligence under anything close to current conditions, probably everyone dies (or is severely disempowered)," and I think the difference between me and Yudkowsky has less to do with social effects on our speech and more to do with differing epistemic practices, i.e. about how confident one can reasonably be about the effects of poorly understood future technologies emerging in future, poorly understood circumstances. (My all-things-considered view, which includes various reference classes and partial deference to many others who think about the topic, is more agnostic and hasn't consistently been above the "probably" line.)
Moreover, I think those who believe some version of "If anyone builds superintelligence, everyone dies" should be encouraged to make their arguments loudly and repeatedly; the greatest barrier to actually-risk-mitigating action right now is the lack of political will.
That said, I think people should keep in mind that:
- Public argumentation can only get us so far when the evidence for the risks and their mitigations is this unclear, when AI has automated so little of the economy, when AI failures have led to so few deaths, etc.
- Most concrete progress on worst-case AI risks — e.g. arguably the AISIs network, the draft GPAI code of practice for the EU AI Act, company RSPs, the chip and SME export controls, or some lines of technical safety work — comes from dozens of people toiling away mostly behind-the-scenes for years, not from splashy public communications (though many of the people involved were influenced by AI risk writings years before). Public argumentation is a small portion of the needed work to make concrete progress. It may be necessary, but it’s far from sufficient.
Recently, I've encountered an increasing number of misconceptions, in rationalist and effective altruist spaces, about what Open Philanthropy's Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) team does or doesn't fund and why, especially re: our AI-related grantmaking. So, I'd like to briefly clarify a few things:
I hope these clarifications are helpful, and lead to fruitful discussion, though I don't expect to have much time to engage with comments here.
Should the reader infer anything from the absence of a reference to GV here? The comment thread that came to mind when reading this response was significantly about GV (although there was some conflation of OP and GV within it). So if OP felt it could recommend US "right-of-center"[1] policy work to GV, I would be somewhat surprised that this well-written post didn't say that.
Conditional on GV actually being closed to right-of-center policy work, I express no criticism of that decision here. It's generally not cool to criticize donors for declining to donate to stuff that is in tension or conflict with their values, and it seems that would be the case. However, where the funder is as critical to an ecosystem as GV is here, I think fairly high transparency about the unwillingness to fund a particular niche is necessary to allow the ecosystem to adjust. For example, learning that GV is closed to a niche area that John Doe finds important could switch John from object-level work to earning to give. And people considering moving to object-level work need to clearly understand if the 800-pound gorilla funder will be closed to them.
I place this in quotes because the term is ambiguous.
Good Ventures did indicate to us some time ago that they don't think they're the right funder for some kinds of right-of-center AI policy advocacy, though (a) the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy and pretty far from the linked comment's claim about an aversion to opportunities that are "even slightly right of center in any policy work," (b) I think the boundaries might shift in the future, and (c) as I said above, OP regularly recommends right-of-center policy opportunities to other funders.
Also, I don't actually think this should affect people's actions much because: my team has been looking for right-of-center policy opportunities for years (and is continuing to do so), and the bottleneck is "available opportunities that look high-impact from an AI GCR perspective," not "available funding." If you want to start or expand a right-of-center policy group aimed at AI GCR mitigation, you should do it and apply here! I can't guarantee we'll think it's promising enough to recommend to the funders we advise, but there are millions (maybe tens of millions) available for this kind of work; we've simply found only a few opportunities that seem above-our-bar for expected impact on AI GCR, despite years of searching.
Can you say what the "some kinds" are?
I think it might be a good idea to taboo the phrase "OP is funding X" (at least when talking about present day Open Phil).
Historically, OP would have used the phrase "OP is funding X" to mean "referred a grant to X to GV" (which approximately was never rejected). One was also able to roughly assume that if OP decides to not recommend a grant to GV, that most OP staff do not think that grant would be more cost-effective than other grants referred to GV (and as such, the word people used to describe OP not referring a grant to GV was "rejecting X" or "defunding X").
Of course, now that the relationship between OP and GV has substantially changed, and the trust has broken down somewhat, the term "OP is funding X" is confusing (including IMO in your comment, where in your last few bullet points you talk about "OP has given far more to global health than AI" when I think to not confuse people here, it would be good to say "OP has recommended far more grants to global health", since OP itself has not actually given away any money directly, and in the rest of your comment you use "recommend").
I think the key thing for people to understand is why it no longer makes sense to talk about "OP funding X", and where it makes sense to model OP grant-referrals to GV as still closely matching OPs internal cost-effectiveness estimates.[1]
For organizations and funders trying to orient towards the funding ecosystem, the most important thing is understanding what GV is likely to fund on behalf of an OP recommendation. So when people talk about "OP funding X" or "OP not funding X" that is what they usually refer to (and that is also again how OP has historically used those words, and how you have used those words in your comment). I expect this usage to change over time, but it will take a while (and would ask for you to be gracious and charitable when trying to understand what people mean when they conflate OP and GV in discussions).[2]
Now having gotten that clarification out of the way, my guess is most of the critiques that you have seen about OP funding are basically accurate when seen through this lens (though I don't know what critiques you are referring to, since you aren't being specific). As an example, as Jason says in another comment, it does look like GV has a very limited appetite for grants to right-of-center organizations, and since (as you say yourself) the external funders reject the majority of grants you refer to them, this de-facto leads to a large reduction of funding, and a large negative incentive for founders and organizations who are considering working more with the political right.
I think your comment is useful, and helps people understand some of how OP is trying to counteract the ways GV's withdrawal from many crucial funding areas has affected things, which I am glad about. I do also think your comment has far too much of the vibe of "nothing has changed in the last year" and "you shouldn't worry too much about which areas GV wants or want to not fund". De-facto GV was and is likely to continue to be 95%+ of the giving that OP is influencing, and the dynamics between OP and non-GV funders are drastically different than the dynamics historically between OP and GV.
I think a better intutition pump for people trying to understand the funding ecosystem would be a comment that is scope-sensitive in the relevant ways. I think it would start with saying:
And another dimension to track is "where OPs cost-effectiveness estimates are likely to be wrong". I think due to the tricky nature of the OP/GV relationship, I expect OP to systematically be worse at making accurate cost-effectiveness estimates where GV has strong reputation-adjacent opinions, because of course it is of crucial importance for OP to stay "in-sync" with GV, and repeated prolonged disagreements are the kind of thing that tend to cause people and organizations to get out of sync.
Of course, people might also care about the opinions of OP staff, as people who have been thinking about grantmaking for a long time, but my sense is that in as much as those opinions do not translate into funding, that is of lesser importance when trying to identify neglected niches and funding approaches (but still important).
I don't know how true this is and of course you should write what seems true to you here. I currently think this is true, but also "60% of grants referred get made" would not be that surprising. And also of course this is a two-sided game where OP will take into account whether there are any funders even before deciding whether to evaluate a grant at all, and so the ground truth here is kind of tricky to establish.
For example, you say that OP is happy to work with people who are highly critical of OP. That does seem true! However, my honest best guess is that it's much less true of GV, and being publicly critical of GV and Dustin is the kind of thing that could very much influence whether OP ends up successfully referring a grant to GV, and to some degree being critical of OP also makes receiving funding from GV less likely, though much less so. That is of crucial importance to know for people when trying to decide how open and transparent to be about their opinions.
Replying to just a few points…
I agree about tabooing "OP is funding…"; my team is undergoing that transition now, leading to some inconsistencies in our own usage, let alone that of others.
Re: "large negative incentive for founders and organizations who are considering working more with the political right." I'll note that we've consistently been able to help such work find funding, because (as noted here), the bottleneck is available right-of-center opportunities rather than available funding. Plus, GV can and does directly fund lots of work that "engages with the right" (your phrasing), e.g. Horizon fellows and many other GV grantees regularly engage with Republicans, and seem likely to do even more of that on the margin given the incoming GOP trifecta.
Re: "nothing has changed in the last year." No, a lot has changed, but my quick-take post wasn't about "what has changed," it was about "correcting some misconceptions I'm encountering."
Re: "De-facto GV was and is likely to continue to be 95%+ of the giving that OP is influencing." This isn't true, including specifically for my team ("AI governance and policy").
I also don't think this was ever true: "One was also able to roughly assume that if OP decides to not recommend a grant to GV, that most OP staff do not think that grant would be more cost-effective than other grants referred to GV." There's plenty of internal disagreement even among the AI-focused staff about which grants are above our bar for recommending, and funding recommendation decisions have never been made by majority vote.
Makes sense. I think it's easy to point out ways things are off, but in this case, IMO the most important thing that needs to happen in the funding ecosystem is people grappling with the huge changes that have occurred, and I think a lot of OP communication has been actively pushing back on that (not necessarily intentionally, I just think it's a tempting and recurring error mode for established institutions to react to people freaking out with a "calm down" attitude, even when that's inappropriate, cf. CDC and pandemics and many past instances of similar dynamics)
In particular, I am confident the majority of readers of your original comment interpreted what you said as meaning that GV has no substantial dispreference for right-of-center grants, which I think was substantially harmful to the epistemic landscape (though I am glad that further prodding by me and Jason cleared that up).
I would take bets on this! It is of course important to assess counterfactualness of recommendations from OP. If you recommend a grant a funder would have made anyways, it doesn't make any sense to count that as something OP "influenced".
With that adjustment, I would take bets that more than 90% of influence-adjusted grants from OP in 2024 will have been made by GV (I don't think it's true in "AI governance and policy" where I can imagine it being substantially lower, I have much less visibility into that domain. My median for all of OP is 95%, but that doesn't imply my betting odds, since I want at least a bit of profit margin).
Happy to refer to some trusted third-party arbiter for adjudicating.
I’m confused by the wording of your bet - I thought you had been arguing than more than 90% are by GV, not ‘more than 90% are by a non-GV funder’
Sorry, just a typo!
I'd rather not spend more time engaging here, but see e.g. this.
Sure, my guess is OP gets around 50%[1] of the credit for that and GV is about 20% of the funding in the pool, making the remaining portion a ~$10M/yr grant ($20M/yr for 4 years of non-GV funding[2]). GV gives out ~$600M[3] grants per year recommended by OP, so to get to >5% you would need the equivalent of 3 projects of this size per year, which I haven't seen (and don't currently think exist).
Even at 100% credit, which seems like a big stretch, my guess is you don't get over 5%.
To substantially change the implications of my sentence I think you need to get closer to 10%, which I think seems implausible from my viewpoint. It seems pretty clear the right number is around 95% (and IMO it's bad form given that to just respond with a "this was never true" when it's clearly and obviously been true in some past years, and it's at the very least very close to true this year).
Mostly chosen for schelling-ness. I can imagine it being higher or lower. It seems like lots of other people outside of OP have been involved, and the choice of area seems heavily determined by what OP could get buy-in for from other funders, seeming somewhat more constrained than other grants, so I think a lower number seems more reasonable.
I have also learned to really not count your chickens before they are hatched with projects like this, so I think one should discount this funding by an expected 20-30% for a 4-year project like this, since funders frequently drop out and leadership changes, but we can ignore that for now
https://www.goodventures.org/our-portfolio/grantmaking-approach/
I used the double negative here very intentionally. Funding recommendations don't get made by majority vote, and there isn't such a thing as "the Open Phil view" on a grant, but up until 2023 I had long and intense conversations with staff at OP who said that it would be very weird and extraordinary if OP rejected a grant that most of its staff considered substantially more cost-effective than your average grant.
That of course stopped being true recently (and I also think past OP staff overstated a bit the degree to which it was true previously, but it sure was something that OP staff actively reached out to me about and claimed was true when I disputed it). You saying "this was never true" is in direct contradiction to statements made by OP staff to me up until late 2023 (bar what people claimed were very rare exceptions).
I don't currently believe this, and think you are mostly not exposed to most people who could be doing good work in the space (which is downstream of a bunch of other choices OP and GV made), and also overestimate the degree to which OP is helpful in getting the relevant projects funding (I know of 1-2 projects in this space which did ultimately get funding, where OP was a bit involved, but my sense is was overall slightly anti-helpful).
If you know people who could do good work in the space, please point them to our RFP! As for being anti-helpful in some cases, I'm guessing that was cases where we thought the opportunity wasn't a great opportunity despite it being right-of-center (which is a point in favor, in my opinion), but I'm not sure.
I'm following up here with a convenience sample of examples of OP staff and grantees criticizing frontier AI companies, collected by one of my colleagues, since some folks seem to doubt how common this is:
Thanks! This does seem helpful.
One random question/possible correction:
Is Kelsey an OpenPhil grantee or employee? Future Perfect never listed OpenPhil as one of its funders, so I am a bit surprised. Possibly Kelsey received some other OP grants, but I had a bit of a sense Kelsey and Future Perfect more general cared about having financial independence from OP.
Relatedly, is Eric Neyman an Open Phil grantee or employee? I thought ARC was not being funded by OP either. Again, maybe he is a grantee for other reasons.
Oops, my colleague checked again and the Future Perfect inclusions (Keley and Sigal) are indeed a mistake; OP hasn't funded Future Perfect. Thanks for the correction. (Though see e.g. this similar critical tweet from OP grantee Matt Reardon.)
Re: Eric Neyman. We've funded ARC before and would do so again depending on RFMF/etc.
You're welcome, and makes sense. And yeah, I knew there was a period where ARC avoided getting OP funding for COI reasons, so I was extrapolating from that to not having received funding at all, but it does seem like OP had still funded ARC back in 2022.
(Fwiw, the Metaculus crowd prediction on the question ‘Will there be another donor on the scale of 2020 Good Ventures in the Effective Altruist space in 2026?’ currently sits at 43%.)
Could you give examples of these?