defun's Quick takes

Member of Technical Staff is often a catchall term for "we don't want to pigeonhole you into a specific role, you do useful stuff in whatever way seems to add the most value", I wouldn't read much into it

From here it seems that indeed «he focuses on the design of the company's Responsible Scaling Policy and other aspects of preparing for the possibility of highly advanced AI systems in the future.»

It seems that lots of people with all sorts of roles at AI companies have the formal role "member of technical staff"

I have only speculation, but it's plausible to me that developments in AI could be playing a role. The original decision in 2000 was to sunset "several decades after [Bill and Melinda Gates'] deaths." Likely the idea was that handpicked successor leadership could carry out the founders' vision and that the world would be similar enough to the world at the time of their death or disability for that plan to make sense for several decades after the founders' deaths. To the extent that Gates thought that the world is going to change more rapidly than he believed in 2000, this plan may look less attractive than it once did.

Why not what seems to be the obvious mechanism: the cuts to USAID making this more urgent and imperative. Or am I missing something?

I wonder if Open Philanthropy thinks about it because they fund both animal advocacy and global poverty/health. Animal advocacy funding probably easily offsets its negative global poverty effects on animals. It takes thousands of dollars to save a human life with global health interventions and that human might consume thousands of animals in her lifetime. Chicken welfare reforms can half the suffering of thousands of animals for tens of dollars. However, I don't like this sort of reasoning that much because we may not always have interventions as cost-effective as chicken welfare reforms.

Yeah, perhaps if you care about animal welfare, the main problem with giving money to poverty causes is that you didn't give it to animal welfare instead, and the increased consumption of meat is a relative side issue.

One potential audience is people open to moral trade. Say Pat doesn't care much about animals and is on the fence between global poverty interventions with different animal impacts, and Alex cares a lot about animals and normally donates to animal welfare efforts. Alex could agree with Pat to donate some amount to the better-for-animals global poverty charity if Pat will agree to send all their donations there.

Except if you do the math on it, I think you'll find that it's really hard to come out with a set of charities, values, and impacts that make this work. Pat would have to be so close to indifferent between the two options.

(And if you figure that out, there's also all the normal reasons why moral trade is challenging and practice.)

I feel like it's hypocritical for animal advocates and EAs from rich countries to blame poor countries for the suffering caused by factory farming.

I don't think this is what the meat-eater problem does. You could imagine a world in which the West is responsible for inventing the entire machinery of factory farming, or even running all the factory farms, and still believe that lifting additional people out of poverty would help the Western factory farmers sell more produce. It's not about blame, just about consequences.

I realise this isn't your main point, and I haven't processed your main argument yet. It would make a lot of sense to me if transferring money from a first-world meat eater to a third-world meat eater resulted in less meat being eaten, but I'd imagine that the people most concerned with this issue are thinking about their own money, and already don't consume meat themselves?

The way people downvote jokes on this forum... At least I appreciated it :)

simply become one of the most successful and influential ML researchers 🤷‍♂️

After years of donating to established organizations (top GiveWell charities), I want to start directing a portion of my donations to new/small charities (eg. Presenting nine new charities). I think this book is helping me better understand which new charities might have more potential.

I also really liked "Part II. Making good decisions", which covers many tools that can be useful for personal and professional decision-making (rationality, the scientific method, EA, Weighted Factor Modelling, etc.).

Fixed. Thanks!

It's an unfortunate naming clash, there are different ARC Challenges:

ARC-AGI (Chollet et al) - https://github.com/fchollet/ARC-AGI

ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) - https://allenai.org/data/arc

These benchmarks are reporting the second of the two.

LLMs (at least without scaffolding) still do badly on ARC, and I'd wager Llama 405B still doesn't do well on the ARC-AGI challenge, and it's telling that all the big labs release the 95%+ number they get on AI2-ARC, and not whatever default result they get with ARC-AGI...

(Or in general, reporting benchmarks where they can go OMG SOTA!!!! and not helpfully advance the general understanding of what models can do and how far they generalise. Basically, traditional benchmark cards should be seen as the AI equivalent of "IN MICE")