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...
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
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, ...
It seems as though event cancellation is now the general norm, so hopefully the situation you outlined is quickly changing.
I don't know what the circumstances were behind any given cancellation, but it might be valuable to look for stories about contentious events (e.g. St. Patrick's Day parades in large East Coast cities) and see if you can pinpoint the reasons that they were shut down.
Similarly, you could look at statements from prominent companies that now encourage employees to work from home (e.g. Alphabet) and see how they explain themselves. (The prestige of those companies may also be a good selling point for other business leaders.)
Thanks! Yes, fortunately the message to cancel everything has gotten out.