Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
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.