Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them....
Previously: GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023 · GiveWell fundraising up 17% in 2024
GiveWell has published its...
My guess is that Microsoft is going to get a lot of that $Bn back in Azure purchases. And they get some currently murky benefits from first access to tech. I doubt they're trying to make that much in the way of financial returns from the stock.
Open AI is trying to give the appearance that the nonprofit board is still very much the important one and that they're still very focused on AGI + safety.
Of interest are Greg Brockman's answers in this hacker news thread.
The HN thread was definitely interesting, since the pivot of Open AI to a limited for profit company occurred, I am certainly concerned about whether they're going to be allocating as many resources for safety as they were and will be much more focused on commercial application development (which I think is a fair, and probably correct, thing to do when you have shareholders who have invested in you for a potential return rather than as a donor to a specific mission)
A note - you can easily find Greg Brockman (the Cofounder and CTO of Open AI) in the thread by his username gdb. One of the more interesting things that he mentions is that they may keep more tech private or for commercial use, and gives a very soft maybe on being able to possibly eventually publish it.