Quick takes

https://www.gap-map.org/?sort=rank&fields=biosecurity

I think this is cool! It shows gaps in capabilities so that people can see what needs to be worked on. 

There's a famous quote, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

I continue to be impressed by how little the public is able to imagine the creation of great software.

LLMs seem to be bringing down the costs of software. The immediate conclusion that some people jump to is "software engineers will be fired."

I think the impacts on the labor market are very uncertain. But I expect that software getting overall better should be certain.

This means, "Imagine everything useful ab... (read more)

Announcing PauseCon, the PauseAI conference.
Three days of workshops, panels, and discussions, culminating in our biggest protest to date.
Twitter: https://x.com/PauseAI/status/1915773746725474581
Apply now: https://pausecon.org

The recent rise of AI Factory/Neocloud companies like CoreWeave, Lambda and Crusoe strikes me as feverish and financially unsound. These companies are highly overleveraged, offering GPU access as a commodity to a monopsony. Spending vast amounts of capex on a product that must be highly substitutive to compete with hyperscalers on cost strikes me as an unsustainable business model in the long term. The association of these companies with the 'AI Boom' could cause collateral reputation damage to more reputable firms if these Neoclouds go belly up. 

And,... (read more)

I've been thinking a lot about how mass layoffs in tech affect the EA community. I got laid off early last year, and after job searching for 7 months and pivoting to trying to start a tech startup, I'm on a career break trying to recover from burnout and depression.

Many EAs are tech professionals, and I imagine that a lot of us have been impacted by layoffs and/or the decreasing number of job openings that are actually attainable for our skill level. The EA movement depends on a broad base of high earners to sustain high-impact orgs through relatively smal... (read more)

Thought these quotes from Holden's old (2011) GW blog posts were thought-provoking, unsure to what extent I agree. In In defense of the streetlight effect he argued that

If we focus evaluations on what can be evaluated well, is there a risk that we’ll also focus on executing programs that can be evaluated well? Yes and no.

• Some programs may be so obviously beneficial that they are good investments even without high-quality evaluations available; in these cases we should execute such programs and not evaluate them.
• But when it comes to programs that where eval

LLMs seem more like low-level tools to me than direct human interfaces.

Current models suffer from hallucinations, sycophancy, and numerous errors, but can be extremely useful when integrated into systems with redundancy and verification.

We're in a strange stage now where LLMs are powerful enough to be useful, but too expensive/slow to have rich scaffolding and redundancy. So we bring this error-prone low-level tool straight to the user, for the moment, while waiting for the technology to improve.

Using today's LLM interfaces feels like writing SQL commands ... (read more)

I've spent some time in the last few months outlining a few epistemics/AI/EA projects I think could be useful. 

Link here. 

I'm not sure how to best write about these on the EA Forum / LessWrong. They feel too technical and speculative to gain much visibility. 

But I'm happy for people interested in the area to see them. Like with all things, I'm eager for feedback. 

Here's a brief summary of them, written by Claude.

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1. AI-Assisted Auditing

A system where AI agents audit humans or AI systems, particularly for organizations involved in AI d... (read more)

"AIs doing Forecasting"[1] has become a major part of the EA/AI/Epistemics discussion recently.

I think a logical extension of this is to expand the focus from forecasting to evaluation.

Forecasting typically asks questions like, "What will the GDP of the US be in 2026?"

Evaluation tackles partially-speculative assessments, such as: 

• "How much economic benefit did project X create?"
• "How useful is blog post X?"

I'd hope that "evaluation" could function as "forecasting with extra steps." The forecasting discipline excels at finding the best epistemic procedu... (read more)

“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff

I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:

Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (e... (read more)

What organizations can be donated to to help people in Sudan effectively? Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/world/africa/sudan-usaid-famine.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE8.fw2L.Dmtssc-UI93V&smid=url-share

Hot take, but political violence is bad and will continue to be bad in the foreseeable near-term future. That's all I came here to say folks, have a great rest of your day.