Open Philanthropy reports on their investment in Sherlock Biosciences to support the development of a diagnostic platform to quickly, easily, and inexpensively identify any human virus present in a sample. (15 mins.)
Shaping the development of artificial intelligence
Ajeya Cotra discusses how we might estimate how long it will take for transformative AI to emerge. This report is very long, so we recommend starting with Rohin Shah's summary.
For more research and discussion on AI timelines, see AI Impacts and LessWrong.
An argument for how advances in military technology (including but not limited to AI) can impede decision-making and create risk, thus demanding greater attention by the national security establishment. (60 mins.)
An explanation of how atomically precise manufacturing could displace industrial production technologies and bring radical improvements in production cost, scope, and resource efficiency. (10 mins.)
A documentary exploring what artificial intelligence can reveal about the ancient game of Go, and what that can teach us about the future potential of artificial intelligence. (Video - 1 hour 30 mins.)
An exploration of ways in which the future of surveillance could be bad, and an investigation into accountable, privacy-preserving surveillance protocols. (Video - 15 mins.)
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...