Quick takes

People often appeal to Intelligence Explosion/Recursive Self-Improvement as some win-condition for current model developers e.g. Dario argues Recursive Self-Improvement could enshrine the US's lead over China. 

This seems non-obvious to me. For example, suppose OpenAI trains GPT 6 which trains GPT 7 which trains GPT 8. Then a fast follower could take GPT 8 and then use it to train GPT 9. In this case, the fast follower has a lead and has spent far less on R&D (since they didn't have to develop GPT 7 or 8 themselves).  

I guess people are thinking that OpenAI will be able to ban GPT 8 from helping competitors? But has anyone argued for why they would be able to do that (either legally or technically)?

What organizations can be donated to to help people in Sudan effectively? Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/world/africa/sudan-usaid-famine.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE8.fw2L.Dmtssc-UI93V&smid=url-share

Should I Be Public About Effective Altruism?

TL;DR: I've kept my EA ties low-profile due to career and reputational concerns, especially in policy. But I'm now choosing to be more openly supportive of effective giving, despite some risks.

For most of my career, I’ve worked in policy roles—first as a civil servant, now in an EA-aligned organization. Early on, both EA and policy work seemed wary of each other. EA had a mixed reputation in government, and I chose to stay quiet about my involvement, sharing only in trusted settings.

This caution gave me flexibili... (read more)

Just Compute: an idea for a highly scalable AI nonprofit

Just Compute is a 501c3 organization whose mission is to buy cutting-edge chips and distribute them to academic researchers and nonprofits doing research for societal benefit. Researchers can apply to Just Compute to get access to the JC cluster, which supports research in AI safety, AI for good, AI for science, AI ethics, and the like, through a transparent and streamlined process. It's a lean nonprofit organization with a highly ambitious founder who seeks to raise billions of dollars for compute.&n... (read more)

There's a famous quote, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

I continue to be impressed by how little the public is able to imagine the creation of great software.

LLMs seem to be bringing down the costs of software. The immediate conclusion that some people jump to is "software engineers will be fired."

I think the impacts on the labor market are very uncertain. But I expect that software getting overall better should be certain.

This means, "Imagine everything useful ab... (read more)

I've been thinking a lot about how mass layoffs in tech affect the EA community. I got laid off early last year, and after job searching for 7 months and pivoting to trying to start a tech startup, I'm on a career break trying to recover from burnout and depression.

Many EAs are tech professionals, and I imagine that a lot of us have been impacted by layoffs and/or the decreasing number of job openings that are actually attainable for our skill level. The EA movement depends on a broad base of high earners to sustain high-impact orgs through relatively smal... (read more)

At Risk of violating @Linch's principle "Assume by default that if something is missing in EA, nobody else is going to step up.", I think it would be valuable to have a well researched estimate of the counterfactual value of getting investment from different investors (whether for profit or donors).

For example in global health, we could make GiveWell the baseline, as I doubt whether there is a ll funding source where switching as less impact, as the money will only ever be shifted from something slightly less effective. For example if my organisation recei... (read more)

Reflections on "Status Handcuffs" over one's career

(This was edited using Claude)

Having too much professional success early on can ironically restrict you later on. People typically are hesitant to go down in status when choosing their next job. This can easily mean that "staying in career limbo" can be higher-status than actually working. At least when you're in career limbo, you have a potential excuse.

This makes it difficult to change careers. It's very awkward to go from "manager of a small team" to "intern," but that can be necessary if you want to le... (read more)

I'd be excited to see 1-2 opportunistic EA-rationalist types looking into where marginal deregulation is a bottleneck to progress on x-risk/GHW, circulating 1-pagers among experts in these areas, and then pushing the ideas to DOGE/Mercatus/Executive Branch. I'm thinking things like clinical trials requirements for vaccines, UV light, anti-trust issues facing companies collaborating on safety and security, maybe housing (though I'm not sure which are bottlenecked by federal action). For most of these there's downside risk if the message is low fidelity, the... (read more)

I guess orgs need to be more careful about who they hire as forecasting/evals researchers in light of a recently announced startup.

Sometimes things happen, but three people at the same org...

This is also a massive burning of the commons. It is valuable for forecasting/evals orgs to be able to hire people with a diversity of viewpoints in order to counter bias. It is valuable for folks to be able to share information freely with folks at such forecasting orgs without having to worry about them going off and doing something like this.

However, this only works... (read more)