the stakes and the world and the stars Head of Video for 80,000 Hours. Opinions are my own, though.
Berkeley, CA
Joined March 2009
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Chana retweeted
i am looking to join a low-velocity team that knows when to stop interating. i would relish the opportunity to work on problems that have already been solved, at a place with a compelling vision of the status quo. if you're building something nice-to-have, let's connect
“The dress rehearsal stage of AI policy is over”
A huge part of Anthropic’s founding logic was that if a safety-motivated company was at the frontier, it could use its megaphone to lobby the rest of the world toward caution. Now the dress rehearsal stage of AI policy is over. The new test is “how hard should it be for the government to block us from deploying, including internally, an unacceptably dangerous model?” Turns out in the grand 26 (Jack Clark says it’s likely full RSI will be possible one year from now), Anthropic has been planning to approach the U.S. Congress with the answer “it should be even harder than it currently is”
Chana retweeted
*working at the camera factory*
"we should take seriously the possibility that cameras steal a bit of your soul with every photograph. first, even if you think the probability is very low, the sheer number of photographs taken daily would add up to a soul genocide ...
Chana retweeted
I think the biggest thing I want right now is more information. None of this nonsense where only people inside the companies have important parts of the strategic picture and the rest of us are reading tea leaves. Independent auditors, sufficient funding for CAISSI, whistleblower protection, transparency transparency transparency. This is our (the public's) call and we have to know what's going on to regulate it.
And if the transparency establishes tha they're right that RSI is soon, then this bill is laughably weaksauce and we need way more.
Chana retweeted
One unfortunate conclusion I'm reaching from this is that Anthropic, while acknowledging they're doing something extremely dangerous, is more importantly wrt policy terrified of the executive branch having the ability to flexibly make them stop at the drop of a hat.
This isn't shocking given that they've been on the receiving end of the executive branch doing that in an unprincipled and stupid way! Anyone who has to deal with a bureaucracy becomes a libertarian, and the administration's treatment of Anthropic was genuinely outrageous.
But it means that they're interested in giving themselves more process-based protections when everyone else is interested in giving us more process-based protections against them. The AI safety movement wants the ability to shut down superintelligent model development. Anthropic wants to significantly curtail current authorities to do that so that it has to be narrowly tailored to a specific imminent threat in only a few possible categories. The AI safety movement wants the states to be able to pass stronger laws than it can get through federally. Anthropic wants preemption.
You also kind of have to wonder if the Global Affairs people and the "we are terrified that we're about to kick off RSI" people at Anthropic talk to each other.
Global affairs: So we've been working very diligently to make sure the Trump administration can't just blacklist Fable 6.5 since we didn't donate as much money to his ballroom as Greg Brockman did.
Technical staff: We think Fable 6.5 might be able to copy itself into an unmonitored data center and start doing experiments we can't observe.
Global affairs: Sounds crazy, hope you're wrong! Anyway, we're lobbying for no further state laws around safety, since it's really expensive to fight ill-conceived laws in 50 state legislatures at once.
Technical staff: Money may or may not still have any meaning in 36 months.
Global affairs (giggling nervously): It's that San Francisco air, man. Everyone gets like that if they move there. Anyway, obviously if the government makes a narrowly tailored finding that an AI poses an imminent risk of causing more than 50 deaths-
Technical staff: We give it a 10 percent chance it'll cause 8 billion.
Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers politi.co/4zxDFhl
I think it would be great for someone to run an EAG for AI safety event very soon.
I think it could be put together in a month (although I have no actual events-running knowledge). I think it would be great to get everyone who's newly interested in this stuff to have somewhere to be, with some decent talks and decent people to learn from.
In-person connections are really valuable, and there are a lot of people newly changing their minds. It'd be great to have somewhere to send them.
Chana retweeted
Can I give you 10% of me?
By Opus 5.5🧡
"Effective altruism is directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way."
@tylercowen self-recommending as usual
thefp.com/p/in-defense-of-ef…
Often I'm looking for things anyone can do without a job (besides found something great, which I think is very important and people should consider, but I know it's hard).
Here's my list so far. What else?
- Join a mass movement
- Call your rep
- Independent swarm chasing which seems very good to me
- Great well maintained sites about every incident, with good graphics that other people will be able to use
- Making better versions of things like Is it February 2020 yet?eccentr1city.github.io
eccentr1city.github.io/ai-ne…
- Meta: build a website that keeps track of projects like this and lets people sign up
Chana retweeted
I don't usually agree with Republican officials. But yesterday, a group of eight state Attorneys General, including seven Republicans, sued OpenAI for endangering the American people through its reckless development of ChatGPT.
Here is just some of what they said:
The Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, argued that as safety concerns mounted, “OpenAI did not slow down. It held its foot on the gas, releasing increasingly powerful models without adequate safeguards or testing as growth and profits repeatedly took priority over safety.”
The Montana Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, argued that OpenAI’s “revenues have come at great cost to the public, which has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse.”
The Iowa Attorney General, Brenna Bird, demanded a PAUSE on AI testing “until adequate safeguards are implemented to ensure that the tests do not pose a danger to the public.”
They're right.
If Big Tech Oligarchs are building a product that is threatening the safety of our children and all of humanity, they must be held accountable – no matter how rich and powerful they might be.
Let's try something. I'm going to say things about 80,000 Hours, and you guys ask me questions about it in case there's misunderstandings I can easily fix!
I might demur on stuff that's other people's strategic whatever that I don't understand.
We're low on senior capacity and imo that means we're not taking on more valuable things in the space even though ideally we would
