Chris Leong's Quick takes

Some people have recently been talking about a decrease in activity on the forum. I've written before about the possibility of a yearly theme. I don't know if it would work, but it seems like it might be worth a shot to counter the risk of stasis. It's somewhat hard to articulate why I think things like this might be valuable, but one of the barriers that a community can face in terms of moving forward is that there's so many potential different topics that people could talk about. Purely relying on the marketplace of ideas often means that it's hard to build momentum around any particular direction the community could be exploring. Now maybe running weeks focused on particular topics already covers this and does it better, but I think it's at least worth exploring.

The last EAG I attended had rules restricting handing out materials.

Having just finished watching this Dwarkesh video which explained how big a deal pamphlets were when they were first invented, I'd actually go the other way and encourage it instead.

Here's my reasoning: Talks have been de-emphasised in favour of one-on-ones at EAGs. There's a lot to like about one-on-ones, but one disadvantage is that we've removed a key avenue for ideas to gain a critical mass and enter the water supply. Pamphlets could fill this gap. After all, if you see a good pamphlet, it'd be quite natural for it to come out during a conversation and for you to pull it out.

Additionally, when you have dozens of one-on-ones, things often blur together. Now, you can be disciplined and keep notes, but that's hard and often I find my phone is short of battery. If people handed out pamphlets containing their proposals or takes, then it'd be easier to review them afterwards; conversations would be much more likely to have effects that last. Two further benefits: it might be more efficient to exchange pamphlets at the start of a one-on-one and producing a pamphlet would convince people to figure figure out how to communicate their ideas clearly.

Looks like Mechanize is choosing to be even more irresponsible than we previously thought. They're going straight for automating software engineering. Would love to hear their explanation for this.

"Software engineering automation isn't going fast enough"^[1] - oh really?

This seems even less defensible than their previous explanation of how their work would benefit the world.

1. ^{^}

   Not an actual quote

I guess orgs need to be more careful about who they hire as forecasting/evals researchers in light of a recently announced startup.

Sometimes things happen, but three people at the same org...

This is also a massive burning of the commons. It is valuable for forecasting/evals orgs to be able to hire people with a diversity of viewpoints in order to counter bias. It is valuable for folks to be able to share information freely with folks at such forecasting orgs without having to worry about them going off and doing something like this.

However, this only works if those less worried about AI risks who join such a collaboration don't use the knowledge they gain to cash in on the AI boom in an acceleratory way. Doing so undermines the very point of such a project, namely, to try to make AI go well. Doing so is incredibly damaging to trust within the community.

Now let's suppose you're an x-risk funder considering whether to fund their previous org. This org does really high-quality work, but the argument for them being net-positive is now significantly weaker. This is quite likely to make finding future funding harder for them.

This is less about attacking those three folks and more just noting that we need to strive to avoid situations where things like this happen in the first place. This requires us to be more careful in terms of who gets hired.

There's been some discussions on the EA forum along the lines of "why do we care about value alignment shouldn't we just hire who can best do the job". My answer to that is that it's myopic to only consider what happens whilst they're working for you. Hiring someone or offering them an opportunity empowers them, you need to consider whether they're someone who you want to empower^[1].

1. ^{^}

   Admittedly, this isn't quite the same as value alignment. Suppose someone were diligent, honest, wise and responsible. You might want to empower them even if their views were extremely different from yours. Stronger: even if their views were the opposite in many ways. But in the absence of this, value alignment matters.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been an attempt (as far as I know) to fund/create a competitor to Epoch.ai.

It wouldn't have to compete on all benchmarks, but it would be good to have a forecasting organisation that could be trusted with potentially dual use insights into capabilities trajectories. I don't believe this would require uniformity of views: it would just require people with a proper sense of responsibility.

I also think that the bad judgement displayed by some of their employees impinges on some of their research (emphasis on some, particularly the more subjective elements, Epoch is still my go-to-source in many cases). Unfortunately, I think there's a difference between being intelligent and being wise and one common way that this distinction plays out is that some quite intelligent folks follow the incentive gradient towards being excessively and reflexively contrarian. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to attack their research, just noting that whilst a second opinion would always have been valuable, the fact that I trust them less on the margin, makes the need for such a second opinion feel more pressing to me.

In terms of producing high-quality research, I'd orient to how Epoch has done many things well, but also made a few mistakes that I would controversially call clear mistakes.

I'm also pretty sure that there's sufficient talent in the space now to create a second such effort. It could also start small and funders could help it scale if it proves itself.

There's an old Facebook group, New EA hub search and planning, that might be worth reviving in light of the incresed amount of funding coming into the space.

Even with more availability of funding, many talented folks won't get funded or will only recieve small amounts. Establishing new hubs that provide an easier entry-way to being surrounded by community seems like potentially quite high value. After all, it takes a village to raise an EA and being surrounded by others is an accelerator to impact.

EA needs more communications projects.

Unfortunately, the EA Communications Fellowship and the EA Blog prize shut down^[1]. Any new project needs to be adapted to the new funding environment.

If someone wanted to start something in this vein, what I'd suggest would be something along the lines of AI Safety Camp. People would apply with a project to be project leads and then folk could apply to these projects. Projects would likely run over a few months, part-time remote^[2].

Something like this would be relatively cheap as it would be possible for someone to run this on a volunteer basis, but it might also make sense for there to be a paid organiser at a certain point.

1. ^{^}

   Likely due to the collapse of FTX

2. ^{^}

   Despite the name, AI Safety Camp is now remote.

Let Manifest be Manifest.

Having a space that is intellectually-edgy, but not edge-lord maxing seems extremely valuable. Especially given how controversial some EA ideas were early on (and how controversial wild animal welfare and AI welfare still are).

In fact, I'd go further and suggest that it would be great if they were to set up their own forum. This would allow us to nudge certain discussions into an adjacent, not-explicitly EA space instead of discussing it here.

Certain topics are a poor fit for the forum because they rate high on controversy + low-but-non-zero on relevance to EA. It's frustrating having these discussions on the forum as it may turn some people off, but at the same time declaring these off-topic risks being intellectually stiffling. Sometimes things turn out to be more important than you thought when you dive into the details. So I guess I'd really love to see another non-EA space end up being the first port of call for such discussions, with the hope that only the highest quality and most relevant ideas would make it over to the EA forum.

I’m pretty bullish on having these kinds of debates. While EA is doing well at having an impact in the world, the forum has started to feel intellectually stagnant in some ways. And I guess I feel that these debates provide a way to move the community forward intellectually. That's something I've been feeling has been missing for a while.

We seem to be seeing some kind of vibe shift when it comes to AI.

What is less clear is whether this is a major vibe shift or a minor one.

If it's a major one, then we don't want to waste this opportunity (it wasn't clear immediately after the release of ChatGPT that it really was a limited window of opportunity and if we'd known, maybe we would have been able to leverage it better).

In any case, we should try not to waste this opportunity, if happens to turn out to be a major vibe shift.

For the record, I see the new field of "economics of transformative AI" as overrated.

Economics has some useful frames, but it also tilts people towards being too "normy" on the impacts of AI and it doesn't have a very good track record on advanced AI so far.

I'd much rather see multidisciplinary programs/conferences/research projects, including economics as just one of the perspectives represented, then economics of transformative AI qua economics of transformative AI.

(I'd be more enthusiastic about building economics of transformative AI as a field if we were starting five years ago, but these things take time and it's pretty late in the game now, so I'm less enthusiastic about investing field-building effort here and more enthusiastic about pragmatic projects combining a variety of frames).

I'd love to see the EA forum add a section titled "Get Involved" or something similar.

There is the groups directory, but it's one of only many ways that folks can get more involved, from EAGx Conferences, to Virtual Programs, 80,000 Hours content/courses to donating.

I'll post some extracts from the commitments made at the Seoul Summit. I can't promise that this will be a particularly good summary, I was originally just writing this for myself, but maybe it's helpful until someone publishes something that's more polished:

Frontier AI Safety Commitments, AI Seoul Summit 2024

The major AI companies have agreed to Frontier AI Safety Commitments. In particular, they will publish a safety framework focused on severe risks: "internal and external red-teaming of frontier AI models and systems for severe and novel threats; to work toward information sharing; to invest in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights; to incentivize third-party discovery and reporting of issues and vulnerabilities; to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated; to publicly report model or system capabilities, limitations, and domains of appropriate and inappropriate use; to prioritize research on societal risks posed by frontier AI models and systems; and to develop and deploy frontier AI models and systems to help address the world’s greatest challenges"

"Risk assessments should consider model capabilities and the context in which they are developed and deployed" - I'd argue that the context in which it is deployed should account take into account whether it is open or closed source/weights as open-source/weights can be subsequently modified.

"They should also be accompanied by an explanation of how thresholds were decided upon, and by specific examples of situations where the models or systems would pose intolerable risk." - always great to make policy concrete"

In the extreme, organisations commit not to develop or deploy a model or system at all, if mitigations cannot be applied to keep risks below the thresholds." - Very important that when this is applied the ability to iterate on open-source/weight models is taken into account

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/frontier-ai-safety-commitments-ai-seoul-summit-2024/frontier-ai-safety-commitments-ai-seoul-summit-2024

Seoul Declaration for safe, innovative and inclusive AI by participants attending the Leaders' Session

Signed by Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

"We support existing and ongoing efforts of the participants to this Declaration to create or expand AI safety institutes, research programmes and/or other relevant institutions including supervisory bodies, and we strive to promote cooperation on safety research and to share best practices by nurturing networks between these organizations" - guess we should now go full-throttle and push for the creation of national AI Safety institutes

"We recognise the importance of interoperability between AI governance frameworks" - useful for arguing we should copy things that have been implemented overseas.

"We recognize the particular responsibility of organizations developing and deploying frontier AI, and, in this regard, note the Frontier AI Safety Commitments." - Important as Frontier AI needs to be treated as different from regular AI. 

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/seoul-declaration-for-safe-innovative-and-inclusive-ai-ai-seoul-summit-2024/seoul-declaration-for-safe-innovative-and-inclusive-ai-by-participants-attending-the-leaders-session-ai-seoul-summit-21-may-2024

Seoul Statement of Intent toward International Cooperation on AI Safety Science

Signed by the same countries.

"We commend the collective work to create or expand public and/or government-backed institutions, including AI Safety Institutes, that facilitate AI safety research, testing, and/or developing guidance to advance AI safety for commercially and publicly available AI systems" - similar to what we listed above, but more specifically focused on AI Safety Institutes which is a great.

"We acknowledge the need for a reliable, interdisciplinary, and reproducible body of evidence to inform policy efforts related to AI safety" - Really good! We don't just want AIS Institutes to run current evaluation techniques on a bunch of models, but to be actively contributing to the development of AI safety as a science.

"We articulate our shared ambition to develop an international network among key partners to accelerate the advancement of the science of AI safety" - very important for them to share research among each other

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/seoul-declaration-for-safe-innovative-and-inclusive-ai-ai-seoul-summit-2024/seoul-statement-of-intent-toward-international-cooperation-on-ai-safety-science-ai-seoul-summit-2024-annex

Seoul Ministerial Statement for advancing AI safety, innovation and inclusivity

Signed by: Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Rwanda, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Türkiye, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the representative of the European Union

"It is imperative to guard against the full spectrum of AI risks, including risks posed by the deployment and use of current and frontier AI models or systems and those that may be designed, developed, deployed and used in future" - considering future risks is a very basic, but core principle

"Interpretability and explainability" - Happy to interpretability explicitly listed

"Identifying thresholds at which the risks posed by the design, development, deployment and use of frontier AI models or systems would be severe without appropriate mitigations" - important work, but could backfire if done poorly

"Criteria for assessing the risks posed by frontier AI models or systems may include consideration of capabilities, limitations and propensities, implemented safeguards, including robustness against malicious adversarial attacks and manipulation, foreseeable uses and misuses, deployment contexts, including the broader system into which an AI model may be integrated, reach, and other relevant risk factors." - sensible, we need to ensure that the risks of open-sourcing and open-weight models are considered in terms of the 'deployment context' and 'foreseeable uses and misuses'

"Assessing the risk posed by the design, development, deployment and use of frontier AI models or systems may involve defining and measuring model or system capabilities that could pose severe risks," - very pleased to see a focus beyond just deployment

"We further recognise that such severe risks could be posed by the potential model or system capability or propensity to evade human oversight, including through safeguard circumvention, manipulation and deception, or autonomous replication and adaptation conducted without explicit human approval or permission. We note the importance of gathering further empirical data with regard to the risks from frontier AI models or systems with highly advanced agentic capabilities, at the same time as we acknowledge the necessity of preventing the misuse or misalignment of such models or systems, including by working with organisations developing and deploying frontier AI to implement appropriate safeguards, such as the capacity for meaningful human oversight" - this is massive. There was a real risk that these issues were going to be ignored, but this is now seeming less likely.

"We affirm the unique role of AI safety institutes and other relevant institutions to enhance international cooperation on AI risk management and increase global understanding in the realm of AI safety and security." - "Unique role", this is even better!

"We acknowledge the need to advance the science of AI safety and gather more empirical data with regard to certain risks, at the same time as we recognise the need to translate our collective understanding into empirically grounded, proactive measures with regard to capabilities that could result in severe risks. We plan to collaborate with the private sector, civil society and academia, to identify thresholds at which the level of risk posed by the design, development, deployment and use of frontier AI models or systems would be severe absent appropriate mitigations, and to define frontier AI model or system capabilities that could pose severe risks, with the ambition of developing proposals for consideration in advance of the AI Action Summit in France" - even better than above b/c it commits to a specific action and timeline

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/seoul-ministerial-statement-for-advancing-ai-safety-innovation-and-inclusivity-ai-seoul-summit-2024

Been thinking about morality recently. Here are my current thoughts, take them with a grain of salt because they aren't battle-tested yet.

There are some strong arguments for utilitarianism, but regardless of what is correct theoretically, in practise utilitarianism doesn't work well without some kind of deontological bars.

Continuing with attempting to develop a pragmatic morality, it then become clear that virtue ethics is important too because a) rules are rigid compared to judgement b) decisions aren't independent but also affect how you'll act in the future^[1].

Some folks may be quite tepid in integrating virtue ethics, but my intuition is that the more common fault will be to give yourself too much latitude, so you'll probably want to revive some of your old deontological bars.

I view the next stage after this as introducing a sort of meta-virtue ethics to balance the three components (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics; obviously it would be possible to break this down further). But this likely gives you too much latitude again, so you'll probably want to introduce some kind of meta-deontology to limit how you update the balance.

You could go further than this, but you'd probably be running into decreasing marginal utility.

1. ^{^}

   Thanks to Austen Erickson who I first learned this perspective from.

Someone really needs to make Asterisk meetup groups a thing.

If this were a story, there'd be some kind of academy taking in humanity's top talent and skilling them up in alignment.

Most of the summer fellowships seem focused on finding talent that is immediately useful. And I can see how this is tempting given the vast numbers of experienced and talented folks seeking to enter the space. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the majority of our efforts should probably be focused on finding people who will be useful fairly quickly.

Nonetheless, it does seem as though there should be at least one program that aims to find the best talent (even if they aren't immediately useful) and which provides them with the freedom to explore and the intellectual environment in which to do so.

I wish I could articulate my intuition behind this clearer, but the best I can say for now is that my intuition is that continuing to scale existing fellowships would likely provide decreasing marginal returns and such an academy wouldn't be subject to this because it would be providing a different kind of talent.

If we run any more anonymous surveys, we should encourage people to pause and consider whether they are contributing productively or just venting. I'd still be in favour of sharing all the responses, but I have enough faith in my fellow EAs to believe that some would take this to heart.

What could principles-first EA look like?

Zachary Robinson recently stated that CEA would choose to emphasize a principles-first approach to EA. Here are my thoughts on the kinds of strategic decisions that naturally synergies with this high-level strategy:

• Growth strategy: Less focused on fast growth, more focus on attracting value-aligned talent:
  • Eternal September effects make it hard to both grow fast and maintain high-fidelity transmission of EA principles.
  • Recruiting from audiences that are capable of engaging in nuanced discussions of what these principles imply
• Local EA groups: More emphasis on making events attractive for long-term members to attend vs. recruiting new members:
  • Greater focus on advertising events in ways that bring repeat customers vs. maximising throughput
• Community investment: If the aim is to build a relatively small, high-talent community instead of a mass movement, then it makes sense to shift some amount of resources from outreach to improving the effectiveness of the community.
  • More emphasis on epistemics improves our ability to pick the right goals and achieve those goals intelligently (rather than throwing people at the problem)
    • Upskilling programs such as the Introductory/Advanced Fellowship or the Precipice reading group are helpful here
    • It may also make sense to start some new programs or orgs focused on topics like epistemics, leadership training or conflict-resolution (I like how there's a EA mental health - I forget the name - which is running training at scale)
    • Mentorship programs may also help with improving the effectiveness of individuals
  • The community can be more effective with less people if we make progress on long-standing community issues such as the lack of low-cost EA Hub or the limited support for people trying to establish themselves in major hubs like San Fransisco or London:
    • It also makes more sense for the community to fix its own issues now that EA is less on the frontlines for AI Safety/x-risk (please comment if you'd like me to explain this in more detail)
  • Question: How can the EA community recursively self-improve?
• Weirdness: A principles-first approach suggests that the community should be more tolerant of weirdness than if we were pursuing a fast-growth strategy:
  • It also suggests more focus on the margin with being a community rather than a professional group given that professional groups experience strong pressure to make themselves seem more respectable.
  • It also suggests that avoiding jargon to maximise accessibility is less of a priority
• Forum debates: Running debates like this to move the community's understanding of different cause areas forward becomes more important for the principles-first approach

Additional comments:

• Some of these proposals make more sense in light of the rise of cause-specific groups (many groups now focus exclusively on AI safety, Effective Animal Advocates have their own conference, Giving What We Can is doing its own movement-building for those focused on donations, particularly donations to global poverty):
  • If a particular cause area wants a higher rate of growth, then cause-specific groups can pursue this objective.
  • Similarly, cause-specific groups can choose to be more professional or more focused on developing respectability.
• A lower-growth strategy makes more sense given the pummelling EA has taken in the public relations realm:
  • Growth would be more challenging these days
  • Attempting to grow really fast is more likely to spark backlash now
  • Recruiting top-notch folks and developing the knowledge and skills of members of the community will improve the impression that folks form about EA
• A lower-growth strategy makes more sense given the reduction in available EA funding:
  • When there was more funding available, it made more sense to bring in lots of people so that we could rapidly proliferate projects and orgs
  • We also had more funding to support people who joined, so the marginal benefit from adding people was greater
• There are many people in EA who either don't have the skills to directly work on high-priority areas or wouldn't enjoy having a career in these areas. Some of these people want to directly do thing rather than just Earn to Give:
  • A greater focus on improving the community would mean that there would be more things for these folks to do.

Looks like you double posted this

There is a world that needs to be saved. Saving the world is a team sport.  All we can do is to contribute our part of the puzzle, whatever that may be and no matter how small, and trust in our companions to handle the rest. There is honor in that, no matter how things turn out in the end.

To Community Build or Not

One underrated factor in whether to engage in community-building^[1] is how likely you are to move to a hub.

I suspect that in most cases people can achieve more when they are part of a group, rather than when they are by themselves. Let's assume that your local community doesn't already provide what you need. Let's further assume that an online community isn't sufficient for your needs either:

Then you have two main options:

• If there's already a hub that provides the community that you need, then you could move there
• You could try to build up the local community

There are a lot of advantages to the former. It can be quicker than trying to build up a community yourself and being in the hub will probably lead to you having more direct impact than you could have even if you managed to build up your local community quite a bit. So while either option could end up being more impactful, there's a lot of reasons why it might make sense for people who are willing to move to just focus on figuring out how to set themselves up in a hub as soon as possible.

However, there are some people who are just not going to move to a hub, because they're too rooted in their current location. My suspicion is that more of these people should be focusing on building up the community.

Since there are less opportunities outside of the hub, the opportunity cost is lower, but more importantly, someone who is planning to stay in the same location over the longer term is likely to capture more of the value from their own community-building efforts.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to everyone and there are definitely people who can have far more impact through direct work, even whilst outside of a hub, than through community building. I would just like to see more people who are planning to stay put pick up this option.

1. ^{^}

   Here I'm using community-building in a broad sense.

I'm not really focused on animal rights nor do I spend much time thinking about it, so take this comment with a grain of salt.

However, if I wanted to make the future go well for animals I'd be offering free vegan meals in the Bay Area or running a conference on how to ensure that the transition to advanced AI systems goes well for animals in the Bay Area.

Reality check: Sorry for being harsh, but you're not going to end factory farming before the transition to advanced AI technologies. Max 1-2% chance of that happening. So the best thing to do is to ensure that this goes well for animals and not just humans.

Anyway, that concludes my hot-take.

I just created a new Discord server for generated AI safety reports (ie. using Deep Research or other tools). Would be excited to see you join (ps. Open AI now provides uses on the plus plan 10 queries per month using Deep Research).

https://discord.gg/bSR2hRhA

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think it's a negative sign that mirror bacteria seems to have pretty much not been discussed within the EA community until now (that said, what really matters is the percent of biosecurity folk in the community who have heard of this issue).

One of the vague ideas spinning around in my head is that maybe in addition to EA which is a fairly open, loosely co-ordinated, big-tent movement with several different cause areas, there would also in value in a more selective, tightly co-ordinated, narrow movement focusing just on the long term future. Interestingly, this would be an accurate description of some EA orgs, with the key difference being that these orgs tend to rely on paid staff rather than volunteers. I don't have a solid idea of how this would work, but just thought I'd put this out there...

I think I posted in one of the threads that I have no knowledge of what private evidence Nonlinear may have, but I just realised that I actually do. I don't think it's a big enough deal for me to go back and try to track down the actual comments and edit them, but I thought it was good practise to note this on short form nonetheless.

I suspect that it could be impactful to study say a masters of AI or computer science even if you don't really need it. University provides one of the best opportunities to meet and deeply connect with people in a particular field and I'd be surprised if you couldn't persuade at least a couple of people of the importance of AI safety without really trying. On the other hand, if you went in with the intention of networking as much as possible, I think you could have much more success.

Is anyone doing broad AI Safety outreach to techies in the Bay Area?

It seems very important to have a group doing this given how much opinions within Bay Area tech influence how AI is developed.

If SB 1047 doesn't pass, this ball being dropped may be partially to blame.

Maybe EA should try to find a compromise on the unpaid internship issue? For example, unpaid internships up to a maximum of 2 days/week being considered acceptable with the community?

This would provide additional opportunities for people to skill up, whilst ensuring that these opportunities would still be broadly accessible.

(In countries where this is legally allowed)

Someone needs to be doing mass outreach about AI Safety to techies in the Bay Area.

I'm generally more of a fan of niche outreach over mass outreach, but Bay Area tech culture influences how AI is developed. If SB 1047 is defeated, I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of such outreach ended up being a decisive factor.

There's now enough prominent supporters of AI Safety and AI is hot enough that public lectures or debates could draw a big crowd. Even though a lot of people have been exposed to these ideas before, there's something about in-person events that make ideas seem real.

I took a look at the post announcing Epoch.

It was interesting noting this comment by Ofer:
 

Jaime Sevilla replied:

Additionally, looking at the post itself:

It's up to the reader to form their own judgement, but it certainly seems to me that the AI Safety community was too ready to trust Epoch.