Rasool
Posts 11
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Topic contributions1
Dylan Patel of Semianalysis (one of the leading semiconductor research firms) did a good recent episode on the Bg2 podcast where he covers this question and others:
I agree with Greg that I'm not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:
Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health
(emphasis mine)
And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:
What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.
Well put! I will add that the competition includes companies like Amazon creating their own chips and others designing silicon specialised for inference (like Groq (not to be confused with xAI's model Grok))
You might find this post interesting, which covered this and 3 other similar recent economics papers
Matthew Yglesias wrote a Giving Tuesday piece about GiveDirectly that makes a compelling case for effective giving to a general audience. The article addresses why one should consider directing charity to the Global South, what makes cash transfers an appealing intervention, and how this approach can be reconciled with the desire to volunteer locally.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-help-the-poorest-people-in
I downvoted. This post would be better if it was a clearer explanation of what the organisation does, its theory of change, impact and cost-effectiveness, and only a brief description of the job opening
Plus it seems like there are a bunch of employees on the website already
GiveWell publish a lot of information from their board meetings, including previously full audio recordings
Re: Possible investment strategies there is a dialogue on LessWrong from November 2023 which I think still holds up. Quoting from the takeaways:
About energy companies, I think the investment idea is less about general global energy consumption via AI, but rather the companies that are helping to build out and power these large data centres.
Microsoft have been investing in nuclear energy, xAI's Colossus cluster was positioned right next to a natural gas plant, Sam Altman invested in and is now chair of the board of nuclear startup Oklo. And my understanding is that power substation equipment is a bottleneck with equipment like transformers now having a lead time of years