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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Why building and backing Welfare Tech companies may be one of the most promising things we can do for billions of animals.
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
* Announcing the launch of Spring Innovation Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifical...
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What incentives and mechanisms do you think would be most effective at getting industrial and academic labs to provide structured access to their models?
Good question. A few possible strategies:
(1) Make it really easy. Have accessible software tools out there, so labs don't have to build everything from scratch.
(2) Sponsor relevant technical research. I'm especially thinking of research falling under "AI security". E.g. how easy is model-stealing, given different forms of access?
(3) Have certain labs act as early adopters. They experiment with the best setup and set an example for other labs.
(4) More public advocacy in favour of structured access.
(5) Set up a conference track where there's a specific role for labs sharing large models in a structured way. The expectations of the content of the paper would be different, e.g. they don't need to have scientifically interesting findings already. The authors explain everything included, e.g. "we have model checkpoints corresponding to XYZ different points in the training run". Analogous to a paper that introduces a new dataset.
(1) seems worth funding to the extent that it's fund-able (like if it were an open source software project)
I'm less optimistic about public advocacy. As ML models have had a greater impact on peoples lives, there's already been more of a public movement looking for more transparency and accountability for these models (which could include structured access). It seems like this isn't a very strong incentive to existing companies' products.
(5) I like a lot, and would fit well with structured evaluation programmes, like BIG-Bench