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This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
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Happy Ozone Day!
The Montreal Protocol, a universally ratified treaty phasing out the use of ozone-destroying CFCs, was signed 37 years ago today.
It remains one of the greatest examples of international cooperation to date.
It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).
I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.
Sure, but it still required a joint decision and international cooperation.
AI is also a heavily concentrated industry with only has a handful of labs with frontier models all in the same country. You could fairly easily largely pause them for a little while at least if you wanted to. I'm not saying this is a good idea or that itwould solve alignment, but it wouldn't actually be that hard.
I think it's helpful to look at successes even if there's aren't so many parallels with current big problems. We can underrate how doable big problems are if the political will is there.