This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: ACX survey closes tomorrow, take it now or lose your chance!
2: EA college meetup updates: late addition meetups at Universidad de Sevilla, Universidade Federal De Santa Catarina, Carnegie Mellon. Time changes at Northwestern, UC San Diego, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Check the post for details.
3: Sorry for no book review last Friday; I was having technical problems with the site. The book review posts will resume this week.
4: You’ve probably seen that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk agreed to “pace the frontier” of AI, with Dario’s essay here as the starting point for a concrete plan. I’m very happy with this development, but it’s one step on a long road, and we can’t rest on our laurels. Lots of things are moving now, there’s a lot of interest in the field, and the opportunities to get involved have never been better. Here are some new ones:
5: Coefficient Giving (a giant effective altruist funder, formerly known as Open Philanthropy) is launching Project Tailwind, a “call for founders to launch ambitious new AI safety initiatives”. If you want to fund a charity/startup working on technical AI safety or the surrounding infrastructure (see a list of specific ideas here), they’re offering “pre-seed funding of up to $2m to develop an idea, seed funding of up to $20m to build an org at scale, and more for exceptional opportunities where teams have a strong track record”.
6: Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman is founding the Mathematical AI Safety Institute, an effort to get mathematicians involved in AI safety research. They are “aiming to hire 10-30 mathematicians to join us in the Bay Area by January, and scale up to 30-100 for September 2027”. If you’re a mathematician who’s depressed about Navier-Stokes and wondering what’s left for human mathematicians in a world where AI capabilities are growing exponentially, this is one possible answer - it’s novel, important, and un-automatable. Apply here.
7: Some frontier AI company employees have expressed an interest in holding their CEOs to the commitments they’ve just made. Pamela Mishkin has organized unded the Coalition Of Concerned AI Staff to unite employees across major companies. And Cassie Pritchard, who I disagreed with about happiness research here but who’s been impressively on-point about AI, is trying to organize a safety-focused labor union; you can reach out to her here. This is why you need to keep a couple of socialists around sometimes!
8: What if you’re not a startup founder, mathematician, or AI company employee? I’m still working on figuring out a good answer to this, but here is a boring boilerplate list of things:
Write to your representative.
Get involved with the PauseAI movement. This is slightly complicated, because PauseAI Global and Pause AI USA recently split acrimoniously. I take PauseAI Global’s side, but it’s not like the Americans are monsters, just hostile and annoying and extremely eye-rolly. If you’re non-American, you’ll want the Global org at https://pauseai.info/. If you’re American, you can either ask the Global org how much progress they’re making towards expanding into the US, join the American org and tolerate their flaws, or join StopTheRace (a smaller group I like in the same space).
Add your name to the assurance contract for MIRI’s march on Washington (they’ll do it if they get 100,000 signatories).
Donate to AI safety causes. EA has lots of institutional money, and the billionaires have most of the obvious things covered, but some partisan organizations, and especially candidates, can’t take certain types of institutional money and need small donors. I don’t have a good list of these right now, so you can do your own research or wait to see if I come up with some later.
Read this year’s ACX voting guides (once they exist), which will highlight local candidates in your area with good opinions.
If you’re interested in a career in AI safety and have relevant skills, get in touch with 80,000 Hours, who offer a career guide, AI-based career counseling, and (occasionally, although they’re very busy) human career counseling.
Attend a local ACX/EA meetup group, which will get you in touch with other concerned people and maybe help you come up with ideas or organize something.
I’ll keep posting opportunities on Open Threads as they come up.