Thanks for writing this! I have a more philosophical counter that I'd love for you to respond to.

The idea of haggling doesn't sit well with me or my idea of what a good society should be like. It feels competitive, uncooperative, and zero-sum, when I want to live in a society where people are honest and cooperative. Specifically, it seems to encourage deceptive pricing and reward people who are willing to be manipulative and stretch the truth.

In other words, haggling gives me bad vibes.

When you think about haggling/negotiating in altruistic context, do you have a framing that is more positive than this? Put another way: Other than saving money for the good guys (us) and costing money for the bad guys (some business), why is all of this "good"?

Ah! Yes that's a good point and I misinterpreted.That's part of what I meant by "historical accident" but now I think that it was confusing to say "accident" and I should have said something like "hisotrical activities".

I agree that they're worth calling out somehow, I just think "lab" is a misleading way to doing so given their current activities. I've made some admittedly-clunky suggestions in other threads here.

I completely agree that OpenAI and Deepmind started out as labs and are no longer so.

I agree that those companies are worth distinguishing. I just think calling them "labs" is a confusing way to do so. If the purpose was only to distinguish them from other AI companies, you could call them "AI bananas" and it would be just as useful. But "AI bananas" is unhelpful and confusing. I think "AI labs" is the same (to a lesser but still important degree).

I think this is a useful distinction, thanks for raising it. I support terms like, "frontier AI company," "company making frontier AI," and "company making foundation models," all of which help distinguish OpenAI from Palantir. Also it seems pretty likely that within a few years, most companies will be AI companies!? So we'll need new terms. I just don't want that term to be "lab".

Another thing you might be alluding to is that "lab" is less problematic when talking to people within the AI safety community, and more problematic the further out you go. I think that, within a community, the terms of art sort of lose their generic connotations over time, as community members build a dense web of new connotations specific to that meaning. I regret to admit that I'm at the point where the word "lab" without any qualifiers at all makes me think of OpenAI!

But code switching is hard, and if we use these terms internally, we'll also use them externally. Also external people read things that were more intended for internal people, so the language leaks out.

Interesting point! I'd be OK with people calling them "evil mad scientist labs," but I still think the generic "lab" has more of a positive, harmless connotation than this negative one.

I'd also be more sympathetic to calling them "labs" if (1) we had actual regulations around them or (2) they were government projects. Biosafety and nuclear weapons labs have a healthy reputation for being dangerous and unfriendly, in a way "computer labs" do not. Also, private companies may have biosafety containment labs on premises, and the people working within them are labworkers/scientists, but we call the companies pharmaceutical companies (or "Big Pharma"), not "frontier medicine labs".

Also also if any startup tried to make a nuclear weapons lab they would be shut down immediately and all the founders would be arrested. [citation needed]

From everything I've seen, GWWC has totally transformed under your leadership. And I think this transformation has been one of the best things that's happened in EA during that time. I'm so thankful for everything you've done for this important organization.

Yep! Something like this is probably unavoidable, and it's what all of my examples below do (BERI, ACE, and MIRI).

There are many examples of organizations with high funding transparency, including BERI (which I run), ACE, and MIRI (transparency page and top contributors page).