You should turn your project into an organization If your team's work is worth doing, it's worth doing as an org When a few people are doing good work together, the question of whether to formally incorporate into an organization can feel like a distraction from doing the actual work. Why take time away from your exciting research project to create an org? There are some real up-front costs to incorporating – dealing with bureaucracy, legal overhead, governance obligations – but I think the benefits of doing so are usually greater and underappreciated. Orgs are sticky A project that loses its founder usually just ends. An org that loses its founder is usually able to recruit a replacement and persist. Orgs can outlast their founders in a way that projects almost never do. This is because orgs have persistent identity, infrastructure, culture and mutual commitments that projects lack and this allows them to live on. In other words, the org itself is a form of capacity and it has a ‘spirit’ that survives the individuals involved. If the work matters, you don't want it to be dependent on any one person choosing to stay, and forming an org reduces that dependency. Orgs can hire Orgs hire people; people join projects. The difference is larger than it sounds. There's a large pool of people who will respond to a job posting at a real organization with a website, but a much smaller pool of people who would respond to a vaguer ask to join a project. When you hire someone, they quit their current job, accept a salary, and take on a defined role with actual responsibility and accountability. When you add someone to a project, they help out at whatever level of commitment they find convenient, which is often not that much, and even that can change at any point. The quality and reliability of the people you can attract and retain is substantially different, and orgs give you the option value to grow in ways that projects don't. Orgs are legitimate A formal organizatio

Help me find my replacement doing farmed animal advocacy grantmaking! I wanted to share a job opening for, in my opinion, one of the coolest jobs to help animals: my job! I'm moving on from Mobius soon, so we're looking for the next person to lead our grantmaking and entrepreneurial projects. The role: You'd manage the grantmaking portfolio for one of the top ten largest funders of farmed animal welfare work globally, plus lead entrepreneurial projects like incubating new organisations and identifying strategic gaps in the movement. You'd work with a small and nimble team and influence where millions of dollars go. Some key details: * Full-time, US-based, remote (Bay Area preferred). We’re open to other countries in exceptional cases, as a contractor. * $70k – $120k depending on experience and location. We can go higher for exceptional candidates. * Open to hiring at two levels: Philanthropy Manager (3+ yrs experience) or Director of Philanthropy (5+ yrs) * Application deadline: Sunday, April 12th Why I'd recommend it: This role is a great mix of grantmaking and incubating/running important projects. You get to collaborate with other donors in the movement, as well as support high-impact nonprofits. Maybe most importantly, you’ll work with a very supportive team, with plenty of learning opportunities, space for personal development, and regular pickleball.  Full job description and application form here.

[ETA: I posted a revised version of this essay here.] AI pause advocates often say they are pro-technology and pro-economic growth, and that they simply make one exception for AI because of its unique risks. But this reasoning will grow less credible over time as AI comes to account for a larger and larger share of economic growth. Simple growth models predict that AI capable of substituting for human labor will raise economic growth rates by an order of magnitude or more. If that's right, then AI will eventually be driving the vast majority of technological innovation and improvements in the standard of living. Stopping AI really would be like halting technology itself, because you would be shutting off the source of nearly all growth. This suggests that proposing to pause AI today is like proposing to pause electricity in 1880: yes, electricity is technically just one technology among many, but pausing it would threaten to shut down progress on most of the others. I also question the premise that AI is unique in its risks. Pause advocates argue that, apart from perhaps nuclear weapons, AI is the first technology to threaten the survival of the human species. But the boundary around "human species" is arbitrary. It only fails to feel that way because, for us today, the human species seems synonymous with the whole world. Replacing us feels like ending the world. Yet a hunter-gatherer tribe might just as easily feel the same way about themselves and their way of life. To them, the development of agriculture would feel like an existential risk. It would, from their point of view, be a threat to everything that matters. In reality, the world is much larger than hunter-gatherer tribes or even the human species. By developing AI, we are bringing into existence a new class of sapient beings, ones who will inhabit the world alongside us. I predict that we will coexist with them peacefully, and I welcome efforts to make that outcome more likely. But peaceful or not,

There's been some discussion here of the claim that AI capabilities improvements have been a consequence of unsustainable increases in inference compute. Redwood Research Astra fellow Anders Cairns Woodruff has written a great post analyzing the data and disputing this.

My counterfactual fantasy. Over on my blog, I wrote about prediction models, replacement value, and how I was taught about saving lives for pennies on the pound. So long Mo Salah, and thanks for all the lives you saved.