Invitation for bets

I’m willing to bet that Anthropic’s revenue growth over the next year will be slower than its revenue growth over the last 3 years. I proposed a specific bet here. Anyone who wants can offer to take the other side of that bet. Or you can make a counteroffer.

I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble. I proposed a specific bet for that, too, here. Feel free to offer to take the other side of that bet or make a counteroffer.

I’d also be open to other bets. It seems pointless to bet about whether AGI or tr... (read more)

Lots of people in the Bay seem to be thinking about/preparing for/making funding decisions based on the idea that lots of philanthropy will be given to AIS/EA cause areas very soon (i.e. end of year-ish). I would love for someone to write the comprehensive steel man case against this, as I think it’s probably underrated (some reasons to think they won’t give the money/it won’t be as much as some assume. Happy to comment/ speak to whoever is interested in doing this.  

I find it icky/disappointing when things like this end up on the 80k job board. Can someone make a case why this is a high-impact job worth advertising on the job board? 

 

Hey everyone, my name is Jacques, I'm an independent technical alignment researcher (primarily focused on evaluations, interpretability, and scalable oversight). I'm now focusing more of my attention on building an Alignment Research Assistant. I'm looking for people who would like to contribute to the project. This project will be private unless I say otherwise.

Side note: I helped build the Alignment Research Dataset ~2 years ago. It has been used at OpenAI (by someone on the alignment team), (as far as I know) at Anthropic for evals, and is now used as t... (read more)

Me and @Fran are co-hosting a podcast, The World Can Be Better! (hosted on Substack, also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube)

In our first co-hosted episode we interview @finm about better futures, the intelligence explosion, and Fin's underrated post 'No ghost in the machine'. 

We'll be recording more episodes soon. We're aiming to a) keep it accessible to an interested but non-specialist audience, and b) to talk to cool people who are working on making the world better. This is on top of full time jobs for both of us, so we're not promising weekly up... (read more)

I sometimes hear complaints from non-native English speakers about how banning undisclosed LLM use in writing is unfair.

Possible pro-tip for non-native English speakers who want to write well but don't want to sound like AI: Just write an article you want to write in your native language, polish it until you're proud of it in your native language, and then ask a frontier LLM (Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, ChatGPT 5.5 Pro) to translate it to English, while reasonably adhering to your original intent and writing.

In my experience and tests, the LLMs are sufficien... (read more)

Did any of the boosters of real-money prediction markets correctly predict that prediction market platforms would be quickly dominated by thinly disguised sports gambling?

(I mean this question literally and earnestly, not as a snide takedown of prediction markets or their proponents)

Suggestion: Leverage Research deep dive

Someone (other than me) should write a deep-dive post about the cult Leverage Research and its infiltration of effective altruism.

The story, in brief:

• Leverage Research is a cult.
• Leverage Research organized the first EA Summit in 2013 and the second EA Summit in 2014. The EA Summits were the first effective altruism conferences of any kind.
• Leverage Research also helped to organize the first EA Global conferences, which began in 2015 and continue to this day.
• In 2016, a major EA program, the Pareto Fellowship, was run la

Snopes did pretty detailed secondary reporting on my analysis of AI use in the recent encyclical. 

I think it's pretty good. Covers some stuff I didn't include in my original analysis, and their conclusion was similar to mine, maybe slightly less strong.

Less technical than my post, and imo not as funny, but also significantly shorter (1600 words), includes some replications and also added some details I didn't know as of time of writing.

Overall a good piece, potentially worth reading/skimming either in addition to or instead of my original analysis.

One reflection I've had in the whole "AI use in the encyclical" affair is to slightly increase my trust in traditional media, especially non-American traditional media, and slightly decrease my trust in social media/new media.

I tried my best to promote my analysis as legibly and reasonably as I could and focused on logos rather than ethos: I didn't frame my article with institutional affiliations and intentionally chose not to include obvious, flashy, but irrelevant signaling. Stuff I could've done but explicitly chose not to: get an ML professor to cosign... (read more)

I started research into farmed animal welfare in Muslim countries and I think this is a useful way to share little updates along the way, and also to track any ideas I come up with so I can refer back to them when I need to compile my findings. Because I'm also working on a grant looking into effective Zakat, and I think I'll end up doing the same thing for that, I'm going to be numbering farmed animal welfare quick takes with FAW# and Effective Zakat quick takes with EZ#.

so.

FAW#1.

Before starting with this project, I was operating under the assumption that... (read more)

Lots of EA orgs say they struggle to hire for ops, marketing and comms. But when they post listings for these roles the salaries are often much lower than what they offer for research and engineering, which they generally find easier to fill. My guess is that orgs are just benchmarking against normal market rates for these roles. But the EA labour market is very different to the normal labour market, if these roles are undersupplied inside EA, I think orgs should be willing to pay more for them.