Thanks!

This seems to me to be an obviously very good use of resources; spending more time on it than necessary to organize it doesn’t, though. If you think we should measure anything in particular lmk! By default we ask people to fill out a feedback form a while after they receive the books where we ask things but that’s not very central and the actual longterm impact is somewhat tricky to measure.

We have bought 1500 copies of IABIED in Russian; over the past few days, sent emails to 1700 winners of olympiads who have previously received HPMOR from us offering the new book; and already shipped 173 copies to them (+ sent 43 e-books)

This reply, given the context, is unbelievable. You, and the entire CEA leadership, should resign. There should not be a place for what your organization did in the 21st century; there are no words to describe how much it is a failure of everything CEA was supposed to stand for that it is CEA where it happened, and that this is your response.

It's not endorsing a specific model for marketing reasons; it's about endorsing the effort, overall.

Given that Meta is willing to pay billions of dollars for people to join them, and that many people don't work on AI capabilities (or work, e.g., at Anthropic, as a lesser evil) because they share their concerns with E&S, an endorsement from E&S would have value in billions-tens of billions simply because of the talent that you can get as a result of this.

Thanks, fixed!

At the beginning of November, I learned about a startup called Red Queen Bio, that automates the development of viruses and related lab equipment. They work together with OpenAI, and OpenAI is their lead investor.

On November 13, they publicly announced their launch. On November 15, I saw that and made a tweet about it: Automated virus-producing equipment is insane. Especially if OpenAI, of all companies, has access to it. (The tweet got 1.8k likes and 497k views.)

In the tweet, I said that there is, potentially, literally a startup, funded by and collaborating with OpenAI, with equipment capable of printing arbitrary RNA sequences, potentially including viruses that could infect humans, connected to the internet or managed by AI systems.

I asked whether we trust OpenAI to have access to this kind of equipment, and said that I’m not sure what to hope for here, except government intervention.

The only inaccuracy that was pointed out to me was that I mentioned that they were working on phages, and they denied working on phages specifically.

At the same time, people close to Red Queen Bio publicly confirmed the equipment they’re automating would be capable of producing viruses (saying that this equipment is a normal thing to have in a bio lab and not too expensive).

A few days later, Hannu Rajaniemi, a Red Queen Bio co-founder and fiction author, responded to me in a quote tweetand in comments:

This inaccurate tweet has been making the rounds so wanted to set the record straight.

We use AI to generate countermeasures and run AI reinforcement loops in safe model systems that help train a defender AI that can generalize to human threats

The question of whether we can do this without increasing risk was a foundational question for us before starting Red Queen. The answer is yes, with certain boundaries in place. We are also very concerned about AI systems having direct control over automated labs and DNA synthesis in the future.

They did not answer any of the explicitly asked questions, which I repeated several times:

- Do you have equipment capable of producing viruses?
- Are you automating that equipment?
- Are you going to produce any viruses?

- Are you going to design novel viruses (as part of generating countermeasures or otherwise)?
- Are you going to leverage AI for that?

- Are OpenAI or OpenAI’s AI models going to have access to the equipment or software for the development or production of viruses?

It seems pretty bad that this startup is not being transparent about their equipment and the level of possible automation. It’s unclear whether they’re doing gain-of-function research. It’s unclear what security measures they have or are going to have in place.

I would really prefer for AIs, and for OpenAI (known for prioritizing convenience over security)’s models especially, to not have ready access to equipment that can synthesize viruses or software that can aid virus development.

‪Is there a write up on why the “abundance and growth” cause area is an actually relatively efficient way to spend money (instead of a way for OpenPhil to be(come) friends with everyone who’s into abundance & growth)? (These are good things to work on, but seem many orders of magnitude worse than other ways to spend money.)‬

(The cited $14.4 of “social return” per $1 in the US seems incredibly unlikely to be comparable to the best GiveWell interventions or even GiveDirectly.)

The target audience of this post (people who the information in this post might move away from donating to Lightcone Infrastructure) are a lot more likely than an average EA Forum user to think of not following the rules on not screwing someone over that this character would follow as an incredibly disappointing thing for Oliver Habryka to have done.

In particular, Keltham wouldn’t do what Oliver would almost regardless of what the information and the third party are.

Reasonable! Thanks.

Horizon Institute for Public Service is not x-risk-pilled

Someone saw my comment and reached out to say it would be useful for me to make a quick take/post highlighting this: many people in the space have not yet realized that Horizon people are not x-risk-pilled.

(Edit: some people reached out to me to say that they've had different experiences with a minority of Horizon people.)