Quick takes

Reposting from LessWrong, for people who might be less active there:^[1]

TL;DR

• FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI^[2]
• This was not publicly disclosed until December 20th, the date of OpenAI's o3 announcement, including in earlier versions of the arXiv paper where this was eventually made public.
• There was allegedly no active communication about this funding to the mathematicians contributing to the project before December 20th, due to the NDAs Epoch signed, but also no communication after the 20th, once the NDAs had expired.
• OP claims that "I have heard second-han

I see a contradiction in EA thinking on AI and politics. Common EA beliefs are that 

1. AI will be a revolutionary technology that affects nearly every aspect of society.
   1. Somehow, if we just say the right words, we can stop the issue of AI from becoming politically polarised. 

I’m sorry to say, but EA really doesn’t have that much of a say on the matter. The AI boosters have chosen their side, and it’s on the political right. Which means that the home for anti-AI action will end up on the left, a natural fit for anti-big business, pro-regulation ideas.... (read more)

There's probably something that I'm missing here, but:

• Given that the dangerous AI capabilities are generally stated to emerge from general-purpose and agentic AI models, why don't people try to shift AI investment into narrower AI systems? Or try to specifically regulate those systems?

Possible reasons: 

• This is harder than it sounds
• General-purpose and agentic systems are inevitably going to outcompete other systems
• People are trying to do this, and I just haven't noticed, because I'm not really an AI person
• Something else

Which is it?

I just learned that Trump signed an executive order last night withdrawing the US from the WHO; this is his second attempt to do so. 

WHO thankfully weren't caught totally unprepared. Politico reports that last year they "launched an investment round seeking some $7 billion “to mobilize predictable and flexible resources from a broader base of donors” for the WHO’s core work between 2025 and 2028. As of late last year, the WHO said it had received commitments for at least half that amount".

Full text of the executive order below: 

WITHDRAWING THE UN

It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using  similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?

Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.

I think more people should consider leaving more (endorsed) short, nice comments on the Forum + LW when they like a post, especially for newer authors or when someone is posting something “brave” / a bit risky. It’s just so cheap to build this habit and I continue to think that sincere gratitude is underrated in ~all online spaces. I like that @Ben_West🔸 does this frequently :)

EA Awards

1. I feel worried that the ratio of the amount of criticism that one gets for doing EA stuff to the amount of positive feedback one gets is too high
2. Awards are a standard way to counteract this
3. I would like to explore having some sort of awards thingy
4. I currently feel most excited about something like: a small group of people solicit nominations and then choose a short list of people to be voted on by Forum members, and then the winners are presented at a session at EAG BA
5. I would appreciate feedback on:
   1. whether people think this is a good idea
   2. How to fr

A minor personal gripe I have with EA is that it seems like the vast majority of the resources are geared towards what could be called young elites, particularly highly successful people from top universities like Harvard and Oxford.

For instance, opportunities listed on places like 80,000 Hours are generally the kind of jobs that such people are qualified for, i.e. AI policy at RAND, or AI safety researcher at Anthropic, or something similar that I suspect less than the top 0.001% of human beings would be remotely relevant for.

Someone like myself, who grad... (read more)

Best books I've read in 2024

(I want to share, but this doesn't seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I'll do it as a quick take instead.)

People who know me know that I read a lot, and this is the time of year for retrospectives.^[1] Of all the books I read in 2024, I’m sharing the ones that I think an EA-type person would be most interested in, would benefit the most from, etc. 

Animal-Focused 

There were several animal-focused books I read in 2024. This is the direct result of being a part of an online Ani... (read more)

Mini EA Forum Update

We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜

One of my main frustrations/criticisms with a lot of current technical AI safety work is that I'm not convinced it will generalize to the critical issues we'll have at our first AI catastrophes ($1T+ damage).

From what I can tell, most technical AI safety work is focused on studying previous and current LLMs. Much of this work is very particular to specific problems and limitations these LLMs have.

I'm worried that the future decisive systems won't look like "single LLMs, similar to 2024 LLMs." Partly, I think it's very likely that these systems will be ones... (read more)