sama's Xitter

More AI news:

4. More OpenAI leadership departing, unclear why. 
4a. Apparently sama only learned about Mira's departure the same day she announced it on Twitter? "Move fast" indeed!
4b. WSJ reports some internals of what went down at OpenAI after the Nov board kerfuffle. 
5. California Federation of Labor Unions (2million+ members) spoke out in favor of SB 1047.

If this is a portent of things to come, my guess is that this is a big deal. Labor's a pretty powerful force that AIS types have historically not engaged with.

Note: Arguably we desperately need more outreach to right-leaning clusters asap, it'd be really bad if AI safety becomes negatively polarized. I mentioned a weaker version of this in 2019, for EA overall. 

I was a bit surprised because a) I thought "OpenAI is a nonprofit or nonprofit-adjacent thing" was a legal fiction they wanted to maintain, especially as it empirically isn't costing them much, and b) I'm still a bit confused about the legality of the whole thing.

AI News today:

1. Mira Murati (CTO) leaving OpenAI 

2. OpenAI restructuring to be a full for-profit company (what?) 

3. Ivanka Trump calls Leopold's Situational Awareness article "excellent and important read"

Welcome to the community! 

I wrote a quick letter I'm happy with. 

(Feel free to DM me for a link tho ofc don't copy anything)

More important than the point of Washington personally owning slaves, the US was two generations behind the UK in banning slavery. A counterfactual where the US didn't leave Britain (or seceded peacefully later on in a manner similar to Canada, Australia, etc) likely means emancipation of slaves much earlier. So at least contemporaneously the "machinery of freedom" argument is implausible; you'd basically need the World Wars/maybe the Cold War before the argument becomes plausible.

(I will do this if Ben's comment has 6+ agreevotes)

This is interesting and definitely updates me a bit, but like others I'm still not convinced. 

One thing I think Huw alludes to, but nobody else have spelled out, is considering net effects on other economic sectors than the ones directly studied. (In economics language, "consider general equilibrium more broadl"y). You say:

If the supply of doctors and nurses is fixed, this is a valid concern. In the real world, the supply of doctors isn’t fixed. When people have the option to earn qualifications in order to go abroad and earn more, they are much more likely to pursue those qualifications. When doctors can go abroad (and earn more), more people want to become doctors. Some of these additional doctors will end up leaving, but some will end up deciding not to.²

This is exactly what happened in the Philippines when US visa rules changed to make it easier to move there as a nurse. Many more Filipinos decided to train as nurses; new nursing colleges opened to accommodate the demand. Many of the newly trained nurses did end up moving, but not (even close to) the majority. Even after some left for the US, the Philippines ended up with considerably more nurses than they’d had before.

The same happened in the IT sector in India. Many people in India went to school and learned IT because they hoped to migrate to the US. But not all ended up getting visas to the US - and those that stayed behind helped start the Indian software boom. India did not end up worse off because people tried to migrate; instead, they ended up with more skilled people than ever before.

Imagine a simple model/story where there's unidimensional STEM competency, call it s. In such a world, perhaps what happens is that some countries with a good fit for a sector (for sake of argument, IT in India, nurses in the Philipines) would have many people in the 99th percentile in s enter that sector without emigration. If emigration via that sector then becomes popular, perhaps 95th-99th percentile people will all enter that sector. Then when the 99th percentile leaves, the remaining people in the 95th-98th percentile people will still buttress the sector (average quality goes down but the effects on that sector are muted because the overall quantity of qualified people goes up). 

However, this masks the effect where other sectors are indirectly affected by brain drain to the exporting sector. (In such a world, perhaps the counterfactual without exports would be that India would have great nurses, or the Philipines would have a tech boom). 

So you can't necessarily infer from a specific sector not suffering that the overall counterfactual effects of emigration are net positive. 

Another aspect here is that scientists in the 1940s are at a different life stage/might just be more generally "mature" than people of a similar age/nationality/social class today. (eg most Americans back then in their late twenties probably were married and had multiple children, life expectancy at birth in the 1910s is about 50 so 30 is middle-aged, society overall was not organized as a gerontocracy, etc).