Callum Hinchcliffe's Quick takes

I am Jason Green-Lowe, the executive director of the Center for AI Policy (CAIP). Our mission is to directly convince Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. As I explain in some detail in this post, I think our organization has been doing extremely important work, and that we’ve been doing well at it. Unfortunately, we have been unable to get funding from traditional donors to continue our operations. If we don’t get more funding in the next 30 days, we will have to shut down, which will damage our relationships with Congress and make it harder for future advocates to get traction on AI governance. In this post, I explain what we’ve been doing, why I think it’s valuable, and how your donations could help.  This is the first post in what I expect will be a 3-part series. The first post focuses on CAIP’s particular need for funding. The second post will lay out a more general case for why effective altruists and others who worry about AI safety should spend more money on advocacy and less money on research – even if you don’t think my organization in particular deserves any more funding, you might be convinced that it’s a priority to make sure other advocates get more funding. The third post will take a look at some institutional problems that might be part of why our movement has been systematically underfunding advocacy and offer suggestions about how to correct those problems. OUR MISSION AND STRATEGY The Center for AI Policy’s mission is to directly and openly urge the US Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. By “strong AI safety legislation,” we mean laws that will significantly change AI developers’ incentives and make them less likely to develop or deploy extremely dangerous AI models. The particular dangers we are most worried about are (a) bioweapons, (b) intelligence explosions, and (c) gradual disempowerment. Most AI models do not significantly increase these risks, and so we advocate for narrowly-targeted laws that would focus their att

Citation: McKay, H. and Shah, S. (2025). Forecasting farmed animal numbers in 2033. Rethink Priorities. The report is also available on the Rethink Priorities website. Executive summary We produced rough-and-ready forecasts of the number of animals farmed in 2033 with the aim of helping advocates and funders with prioritization decisions. We focus on the most numerous groups of farmed animals: broiler chickens, finfishes, shrimps, and select insect species. Our forecasts suggest almost 6 trillion of these animals could be slaughtered in 2033 (Figure 1).   Figure 1: Invertebrates could account for 95% of farmed animals slaughtered in 2033 according to our midpoint estimates. Note that ‘Insects’ only includes black soldier fly larvae and mealworms. Our midpoint estimates point to a potential fourfold increase in the number of animals slaughtered from 2023 to 2033 and a doubling of the number of animals farmed at any time. Invertebrates drive the majority of this growth, and could account for 95% of farmed animals slaughtered in 2033 (see Figure 1) and three quarters of those alive at any time in our mid-point projections. We believe our forecasts point to an urgent need to address critical questions around the sentience and welfare of farmed invertebrates. Our estimates come with many caveats and warnings. In particular: * Species scope: For practicality, we produced numbers only for a few key animal groups: broiler chickens, finfishes, shrimp, and certain insects (black soldier flies and mealworms only). * Sensitivity to insect farming growth: Our forecasts are particularly sensitive to the growth in insect farming, which is highly sensitive to the success of insect farming business models and their ability to attract future investment. The recent and forecasted estimates, with 90% subjective credible intervals, can be viewed below in Table 1.  Table 1: Estimates of recent and forecasted numbers of broiler chickens, finfishes, shrimps, and insects slau