X-Risk Daily: a new AI-curated daily briefing

This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack. The goals of this post are to: 1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...

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Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·2d ago·8m read

“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...

Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion

Habiba Banu·6h ago·6m read

Summary Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step. The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...

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What you get

The page is styled like a news app homepage. The most important story leads, followed by a grid of the next most significant stories, then sections by category. Each story has a headline, a short summary, and a short explanation of its relevance to existential risk.^[3]

Stories are separated into three sections:

News: policy announcements, capability releases, incidents, geopolitical developments

Research: original studies and technical reports from organisations like Epoch AI, METR, and GovAI

Analysis: commentary and deep dives from specialist newsletters

You can expand any story to read the full summary, or click through to the original source. Headline stories get AI enrichment drawing on multiple hyperlinked sources. There's also a category filter if you want to hide topics you care less about. Important stories carry forward across days, so if you skip a day you won't miss something significant.

You receive a short teaser email each day with the day's top headlines and a link to the full briefing. It's not the main event, it just tells you when there's an update to click to.

Let me know how to make this useful to you!

This is a personal side project (not affiliated with my employer). The summaries are AI-generated. It's been running for a couple of months with ~25 beta testers, but it's still early stage and feedback is very welcome. I've managed to implement most feature requests from reader feedback. Reply to any email or comment here about what would make it more valuable to you!

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Specialist newsletters: Transformer, ChinaTalk, Import AI, Sentinel, Center for AI Safety Newsletter, ChinAI.

Research and commentary: Epoch AI, METR, GovAI, AI Snake Oil, Future of Life Institute, 80,000 Hours, Interconnects, The Gradient, Lawfare, Astral Codex Ten, LessWrong (30+ karma), EA Forum (30+ karma).

Mainstream news: BBC (World, Science, Europe), The Guardian, Al Jazeera.

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I hate having to pick between the AIS/EA bubble and disconnected, normie news; this was one of the original problems that motivated me to create this tool. Also, beyond being obviously relevant for x-risk via nuclear war, I think that real-world-politics things like the influence of malevolent or ideologically fanatical actors are underrated as risk factors for x-risk and s-risk. I expect others to dislike the inclusion/prominence of geopolitics stories, so there's a filter button in the top right that you can use to exclude certain categories of story entirely.

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I won't lie, these AI explanations of relevance are a bit hit and miss. I skim them unless I'm like: 'wait, why did this make it in?'.