AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy

How speculation gets laundered through pseudo-quantification

Learnings from a week in the wet lab — LessWrong

I work on biosafety evals for LLMs, but have never set foot in a wet lab. This seems kind of silly, so this week I decided to change that.  …

First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.

Over the weekend, a clip about “Anthropic thinks it’s building God” started making the rounds.

#13: A Timeline of the OpenAI Board

Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI.

Effective Altruism Funded the “AI Existential Risk” Ecosystem with Half a Billion Dollars

The “AI Existential Safety” field did not arise organically. Effective Altruism invested $500 million in its growth and expansion.

Think tank tied to tech billionaires played key role in Biden’s AI order

Researchers from the RAND Corporation — which took more than $15 million this year from a group financed by a Facebook co-founder — were a driving force behind the White House’s sweeping new AI reporting requirements.

Congress warns science agency over AI grant to tech-linked think tank

Lawmakers are worried the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s planned grant to the RAND Corp. lacks transparency.

Liron Shapira on Twitter / X

Meet the guy who invented @OpenAI's RLHF technique (https://t.co/opc5yWzi2e).His name is Dr. @PaulFChristiano, PhD Comp Sci from UC Berkeley.Paul says there's a 50% chance of doom once AI systems are human-level intelligent.So do we keep training smarter AI systems or no?🤔 pic.twitter.com/5U1EMsPADB— Liron Shapira (@liron) April 25, 2023

AI Doomers Are Starting to Admit It: They’re Going Too Far

One of the biggest doomsayers of artificial intelligence has done an about-face—and it could help save the world.

What the heck is wrong with our AI overlords?

New profile of Sam Altman shines a light on a whole industry.

NIST faces crisis over Paul Christiano hire | VentureBeat

NIST faces turmoil as staff consider quitting over Paul Christiano's expected appointment to a role at the US AI Safety Institute, sources say.

U.S. Must Act Quickly to Avoid Risks From AI, Report Says

The U.S. government must move “decisively” to avert an “extinction-level threat" to humanity from AI, says a government-commissioned report

The AI Doomers Have Infiltrated Washington

This week, a State Department funded report declared that AI posed an existential threat akin to nuclear weapons—and even recommended jail time for unauthorized AI development.

I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried.

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Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong

Disclaimer: I’m somewhat nervous about posting this, for fear of down-voting on my first LW post, given that this post explicitly talks in a positive light about organisations that I have helped to set up. But I think that the topic is of interest to LW-ers, and I’m hoping to start a rational discussion. So here it goes…

Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better

Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.

I Need You To Understand That “Moving Fast and Breaking Things” Is Playing With Peoples’ Lives

Scattered thoughts in reaction to alleged AI IPOs

Reflections on Anthropic and EA

Personal reflections I've been sitting on lately.

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage) — LessWrong

I appreciate Zoe Curzi's revelations of her experience with Leverage.  I know how hard it is to speak up when no or few others do, and when people ar…

The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0

Between 2011-2019, Leverage Research explored the deep psychology of Effective Altruism and Silicon Valley, then suddenly dissolved among rumors of "demons." What happened?