Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck.
Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soare...
NB: I have my own little archive of EA content and I got an alert that several links popped up as dead - typically I would just add it to a task list and move on… but I was surprised to see Joe’ Rogan’s (full) interview with Will Macaskill in 2017 was no longer available on YouTube. So I investigated and found out Rogan recently sold his entire catalog and future episodes to Spotify (for $100 million!). Currently Spotify is removing episodes from other platforms like Apple, Youtube and Vimeo. They’ve also decided to not transfer certain episodes that violate their platform’s rules on content (i.e. it’s controversial or offensive). I was a little alarmed that Will’s interview might be on the cut-list but alas it still exists on Spotify, but you now have to make a (free) account to access it.
This is a good thing to call attention to! One of the reasons we add older EA content to the Forum is to make sure it exists in one more easily accessible place, in case another site or service goes down.