Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck.
Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soare...
A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, ...
I started a series on organizations working on burning problems that are also unusually good at growth, and what programs can learn from them. First one is Climatebase.
Some numbers: their newsletter grew from about 7,000 subscribers in 2021 to 150,000 in 2026. The fellowship, launched in 2022, has had 15,000+ applicants over its first seven cohorts and 4,500 alumni to date, accepting roughly one in five, at $1,990 a seat. Cohorts grew from about 450 to about 650 at the same price. Many free, funded programs struggle to fill at a fraction of that size.
I tried to understand why:
https://annapit.substack.com/p/free-should-mean-more-demand-so-why
Pushback welcome, and suggestions for who to look at next.