Here are some services EAs might use more if they had easier access:
- copyediting (in-depth editing of a piece to making it clearer, etc)
- proofreading (more nitty-gritty spelling and grammar checking)
- formatting into a specific format (markdown, etc)
Larger organizations usually hire or contract with at least one copyeditor and to help make their written work clearer and more consistent. But a lot of people might want occasional copyediting and not find it worthwhile to go through the hassle of finding someone to do it. Particularly if they want someone with enough knowledge of EA that they can help improve and clarify EA-specific material.
A colleague writes, "I've had ~10 people ask me in the last year about finding copyeditor services, and have recommended them to many more people. Would be great to have a bank of available people who authors could hire."
I would be excited if someone started a project coordinating this! Similar to what Pineapple Operations is doing with personal and executive assistants.
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In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress:
* OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI"
* Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years"
* Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January.
What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028?
In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years.
In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning.
In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks.
We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.
On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.
No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote).
This means that, while the compa
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SUMMARY:
ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate.
Donate to ALLFED
FULL ARTICLE:
I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.
Read our funding appeal
At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety.
Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
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We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups.
I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected.
In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here’s a very basic threat model for AI takeover:
1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for itself
And now here’s a closely analogous threat model for AI-enabled coups:
1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is controlled by a small group
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for the small group
While the report focuses on the risk that someone seizes power over a country, I think that similar dynamics could allow someone to take over the world. In fact, if someone wanted to take over the world, their best strategy might well be to first stage an AI-enabled coup in the United States (or whichever country leads on superhuman AI), and then go from there to world domination. A single person taking over the world would be really bad. I’ve previously argued that it might even be worse than AI takeover. [1]
The concrete threat models for AI-enabled coups that we discuss largely translate like-for-like over to the risk of AI takeover.[2] Similarly, there’s a lot of overlap in the mitigations that help with AI-enabled coups and AI takeover risk — e.g. alignment audits to ensure no human has made AI secretly loyal to them, transparency about AI capabilities, monitoring AI activities for suspicious behaviour, and infosecurity to prevent insiders from tampering with training.
If the world won't slow down AI development based on AI takeover risk (e.g. because there’s isn’t strong evidence for misalignment), then advocating for a slow down based on the risk of AI-enabled coups might be more convincing and achieve many of the same goals.
I really want to encourage readers — especially those at labs or governments — to do something
As a reminder in case people were unaware, we provide free editing services on LessWrong for anyone above 100 karma on the site: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nsCwdYJEpmW5Hw5Xm/lesswrong-is-providing-feedback-and-proofreading-on-drafts
Just click the "Request Feedback" button when you are writing a new post, and a chat window will pop up asking you what kind of feedback you want, and within 24 hours someone will have left comments and suggestions on your post.
FWIW: highly, highly recommend LessWrong's editing services! Justis Millis in particular gave excellent feedback, across the gamut of low-level formatting to high-level content ideas, in a stunningly short amount of time (<48h, iirc).
Thanks! Yeah, I think right now I do ~all the feedback requests, and my goal tends to be 24h turnaround time or less (though it does sometimes get closer to 48h).
I've found the LessWrong editing service to be a pretty exciting way to provide copyediting, proofreading, feedback etc. to lots and lots of individuals over the last several months. Perhaps an expansion of that model could be valuable? This month there were 32 posts I did copyediting for through the service, which is more than usual but not by too much. That's way more than I would have even actively trying to promote myself, and I haven't had to do the promoting (or handle billing with a whole bunch of individuals). If there's more money for centralized-funding-of-edits, I at least continue to have excess capacity there and find it a lot of fun!
Thanks for this post!
Here's a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habryka's comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
"Mesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/good copyeditors/proofreaders/formatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things they're working on? (By "formatters", I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe there'd be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then there's the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/scalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. I'd like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :D"
I'm willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the author's ability to pay); I'm very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/proofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.
I plan to start offering this – among other things – for free through the Altruistic Agency later this year.
@Amber Dawn does this. Conflict of interest - she's my partner. https://amber-dawn-ace.com/
Another type of service that would be useful is accessibility services, such as writing transcripts/timed text for audio and video (e.g. podcasts) and alt text for images.
I used to do transcribing with timestamps. I met some cool people and learned a lot about the topics I was working on that way. It was a good remote flex-time freelance job for me at 20. I rarely do transcription work anymore, but I would be happy to do a call about what I learned and my setup with anyone considering this line of work.