In four days (July 11, 12-4pm), about ~200 of us (event link), including 13 different groups, will be marching on OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in SF asking the CEOs to commit to stop developing more powerful models if every other major AI company (and China) does the same. We're calling this The AI Protest (theprotest.ai).
We're gonna have some of the speakers from last time (Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor)) but also try to get folks from different groups part of the coalition speaking too.
As Scott Alexander puts it: "Participants are about half from our conspiracy and half from random anti-data-center-type groups, which I think is how this basically has to work, so don’t be surprised if you run into the latter."
On why we're doing this, see:
The blurb in the stoptherace.ai website where I explain that "expects" from CEOs isn't actually committing, and why we need committments
Ronak's post on why you should come to the protest
4. re unions: I know of at least one employee trying this. And a couple whisteblower orgs that might have more knowledge of this, some of them trying to find anonymous ways of collaborating between employees. Message me on Signal (mtrazzi.99) if you'd like to help.
In two days (March 21st, 12-4pm), about 140 of us (event link) will be marching on Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in SF asking the CEOs to make statements on whether they would stop developing new frontier models if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same. This comes after Anthropic removed its commitment to pause development from their RSP.
We'll be starting at 500 Howard St, San Francisco (Anthropic's Office, full schedule and more info here). This is shaping to be the biggest US AI Safety protest to date, with a coalition including Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor) and folks representing PauseAI, QuitGPT, Humans First.
I used to visit SF in the summer from 2022 to 2024 and the SF scene felt quite disconnected compared to Berkeley. But now there is this 4-floor building where a lot of interesting people work, eat, and hang out every day.
Mox feels like this cozy coworking space where you can both work and relax. I know at least two people who describe it as their living room, but better and bigger.
I personally think that without Mox I'd have a way harder time finding a productive spot to work from in the bay, would have not met a bunch of people I work with every day, and would also not have smoothly organized some cool events like two of my documentary screenings where 100+ people showed up.
Wouldn't investors fire Dario and replace him with someone who would maximize profits?
Note: My understanding is that, as of November 2024, the Long-Term Benefit Trust controls 3 of 5 board seats, so investors alone cannot fire him. However, a supermajority of voting shareholders could potentially amend the Trust structure first, then replace the board and fire him.
Hi Alice, thanks for the datapoint. It's useful to know you have been a LessWrong user for a long time.
I agree with your overall point that the people we want to reach would be on platforms that have a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Here are some reasons for why I think it might still make sense to post short-form (not trying to convince you, I just think these arguments are worth mentioning for anyone reading this):
Even if there's more people we want to reach who watch longform vs. short-form (or even who read LessWrong), what actually matters is whether short-form content is neglected, and whether the people who watch short-form would also end up watching long-form anyway. I think there's a case for it being neglected, but I agree that a lot of potentially impactful people who watch TikTok probably also watch Youtube.
The super-agentic people who have developed substantial "cog sec" and manage to not look at any social media at all would probably only be reachable via LessWrong / arXiv papers, which is an argument that undermines most AI Safety comms, not just short-form. To that I'd say:
I remember Dwarkesh saying somewhere that 30% of his podcast growth comes from short-form. This hints at short-form bringing potential long-form viewer / listener, and those Dwarkesh listeners are people we'd want to reach.
Youtube pushes aggressively for short-form. And for platforms like Instagram it's even harder to ignore.
It's possible to not use Instagram at all, and disable short-form recommendations on Youtube, but every time you add a "cog sec" criteria you're filtering even more people. (A substantial amount of my short-form views come posting on YT shorts, and I'm planning to extend to Instagram soon).
Similarly to what @Cameron Holmes argues below, broad public awareness is also a nice externality, not just getting more AI Safety talent.
You could imagine reaching people indirectly (think your friend who does watch short-form content talks to you about what they've learned at lunch).
When I actually look at the data of what kind of viewers watch my short-form content, it's essentially older people (> 24yo, even >34yo) from high-income countries like the US. It's surprisingly not younger people (who you might expect to have shorter attention span / be less agentic).
Thanks! Just want to add some counterpoints and disclaimers to that: - 1. I want to flag that although I've filmed & edited ~20 short-form clips in the past (eg. from June 2022 to July 2025) around things like AI Policy and protests, most of the content I've recently been posting as just been clips from other interviews. So I think it would also be unfair to compare my clips and original content (both short-form and longform), which is why I wrote this post. (I started doing this because I ran out of footage to edit shortform videos as I was trying to publish one TikTok a day, and these clips eventually reached way more people than what I was doing before, so I transitioned to doing that). - 2. regarding comparing to high-production videos: I don't want to come across as saying we shouldn't compare work of different length or using different budgets. I think Marcus and Austin's attempt is honorable. Also, being able to correctly use a large budget to make a high-production video that reaches as many people as many lower budget videos requires a lot of skill, though once you have that level of skill then the amount of time you spend on a video to make it really good ends up leading to exponential results in views (if you make something that is 10% better, Youtube will push it much more than 10% more).
Glad you're working with some of the people I recommended to you, I'm very proud of that SB-1047 documentary team.
I would add to the list Suzy Shepherd who made Writing Doom. I believe she will relatively soon be starting another film. I wrote more about her work here.
For context, you asked me for data for something you were planning (at the time) to publish day-off. There's no way to get the watchtime easily on TikTok (which is why I had to do manual addition of things on a computer) and I was not on my laptop, so couldn't do it when you messaged me. You didn't follow up to clarify that watchtime was actually the key metric in your system and you actually needed that number.
Good to know that the 50 people were 4 Safety people and 46 people who hang at Mox and Taco Tuesday. I understand you're trying to reach the MIT-graduate working in AI who might somehow transition to AI Safety work at a lab / constellation. I know that Dwarkesh & Nathan are quite popular with that crowd, and I have a lot of respect for what Aric (& co) did, so the data you collected make a lot of sense to me. I think I can start to understand why you gave a lower score to Rational Animations or other stuff like AIRN.
I'm now modeling you as trying to answer something like "how do we cost-effectively feed AI Safety ideas to the kind of people who walk in at Taco Tuesday, who have the potential to be good AI Safety researchers". Given that, I can now understand better how you ended up giving some higher score to Cognitive Revolution and Robert Miles.
In four days (July 11, 12-4pm), about ~200 of us (event link), including 13 different groups, will be marching on OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in SF asking the CEOs to commit to stop developing more powerful models if every other major AI company (and China) does the same. We're calling this The AI Protest (theprotest.ai).
We're gonna have some of the speakers from last time (Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor)) but also try to get folks from different groups part of the coalition speaking too.
As Scott Alexander puts it: "Participants are about half from our conspiracy and half from random anti-data-center-type groups, which I think is how this basically has to work, so don’t be surprised if you run into the latter."
On why we're doing this, see:
4. re unions: I know of at least one employee trying this. And a couple whisteblower orgs that might have more knowledge of this, some of them trying to find anonymous ways of collaborating between employees. Message me on Signal (mtrazzi.99) if you'd like to help.
In two days (March 21st, 12-4pm), about 140 of us (event link) will be marching on Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in SF asking the CEOs to make statements on whether they would stop developing new frontier models if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same. This comes after Anthropic removed its commitment to pause development from their RSP.
We'll be starting at 500 Howard St, San Francisco (Anthropic's Office, full schedule and more info here). This is shaping to be the biggest US AI Safety protest to date, with a coalition including Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor) and folks representing PauseAI, QuitGPT, Humans First.
I used to visit SF in the summer from 2022 to 2024 and the SF scene felt quite disconnected compared to Berkeley. But now there is this 4-floor building where a lot of interesting people work, eat, and hang out every day.
Mox feels like this cozy coworking space where you can both work and relax. I know at least two people who describe it as their living room, but better and bigger.
I personally think that without Mox I'd have a way harder time finding a productive spot to work from in the bay, would have not met a bunch of people I work with every day, and would also not have smoothly organized some cool events like two of my documentary screenings where 100+ people showed up.
Wouldn't investors fire Dario and replace him with someone who would maximize profits?
Note: My understanding is that, as of November 2024, the Long-Term Benefit Trust controls 3 of 5 board seats, so investors alone cannot fire him. However, a supermajority of voting shareholders could potentially amend the Trust structure first, then replace the board and fire him.
Hi Alice, thanks for the datapoint. It's useful to know you have been a LessWrong user for a long time.
I agree with your overall point that the people we want to reach would be on platforms that have a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Here are some reasons for why I think it might still make sense to post short-form (not trying to convince you, I just think these arguments are worth mentioning for anyone reading this):
That's usueful data, thanks!
How confident are you that an exponential is a good fit here? The 2025 datapoint make the Research org & FTE curves look more like S-curves to me.
Thanks! Just want to add some counterpoints and disclaimers to that:
- 1. I want to flag that although I've filmed & edited ~20 short-form clips in the past (eg. from June 2022 to July 2025) around things like AI Policy and protests, most of the content I've recently been posting as just been clips from other interviews. So I think it would also be unfair to compare my clips and original content (both short-form and longform), which is why I wrote this post. (I started doing this because I ran out of footage to edit shortform videos as I was trying to publish one TikTok a day, and these clips eventually reached way more people than what I was doing before, so I transitioned to doing that).
- 2. regarding comparing to high-production videos: I don't want to come across as saying we shouldn't compare work of different length or using different budgets. I think Marcus and Austin's attempt is honorable. Also, being able to correctly use a large budget to make a high-production video that reaches as many people as many lower budget videos requires a lot of skill, though once you have that level of skill then the amount of time you spend on a video to make it really good ends up leading to exponential results in views (if you make something that is 10% better, Youtube will push it much more than 10% more).
Glad you're working with some of the people I recommended to you, I'm very proud of that SB-1047 documentary team.
I would add to the list Suzy Shepherd who made Writing Doom. I believe she will relatively soon be starting another film. I wrote more about her work here.
For context, you asked me for data for something you were planning (at the time) to publish day-off. There's no way to get the watchtime easily on TikTok (which is why I had to do manual addition of things on a computer) and I was not on my laptop, so couldn't do it when you messaged me. You didn't follow up to clarify that watchtime was actually the key metric in your system and you actually needed that number.
Good to know that the 50 people were 4 Safety people and 46 people who hang at Mox and Taco Tuesday. I understand you're trying to reach the MIT-graduate working in AI who might somehow transition to AI Safety work at a lab / constellation. I know that Dwarkesh & Nathan are quite popular with that crowd, and I have a lot of respect for what Aric (& co) did, so the data you collected make a lot of sense to me. I think I can start to understand why you gave a lower score to Rational Animations or other stuff like AIRN.
I'm now modeling you as trying to answer something like "how do we cost-effectively feed AI Safety ideas to the kind of people who walk in at Taco Tuesday, who have the potential to be good AI Safety researchers". Given that, I can now understand better how you ended up giving some higher score to Cognitive Revolution and Robert Miles.