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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1ZQOF1yAo
A key & peele video that is effectively EA dark humor. Enjoy!
Curated and popular this week
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...
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TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
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Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice.
Typically their motivation is either that (a) they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building, or (b) they think an ecosystem needs more new projects generally to absorb more talent and deploy more funding effectively.
Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious...
Recent opportunities to take action
Idea: The coronavirus' timing is an opportunity for biorisk to become a major political issue. If we can frame a discussion in the coming post-primary months around what each candidate will do in their next 4 year term to improve pandemic response and prevention, it is likely that pandemic response could become a big discussion point in august-november pre-election discussions and hopefully translate to significant policy moves in the next 4 year presidential cycle.
Would love your thoughts!
Certainly a good topic to be thinking about now!
This falls into a common category for me: "Would be great if it happened, not sure who would make it happen."
As far as I'm aware, most EA-funded biosecurity work currently happens in Europe (e.g. CSER/FHI). I don't know of existing policy organizations in the U.S. that we are linked to, and that are sufficiently large/influential to exert pressure on "discussion points" in the upcoming election cycle.
Did you have a particular "we" in mind when you used the phrase "we can frame a discussion"?
The
Blue Ribbon Panel on BiodefenseBipartisan Commission on Biodefense is funded by OpenPhil and works in the US FWIW.OTOH, I think if it became a talking point in debates it could wind up with more funding, but would also risk becoming politicized, which could be bad for the efficacy of the approaches that end up being used.