Quick takes

edit: update:

At my particular place, I think that improving AI safety community epistemics (writing thorough and careful arguments against people both in the community and outside of it who make silly mistakes) is, by most reasonable estimates, probably less impactful than helping to run MAIA, which is what I currently spend most of my time doing. I don’t think I’m the only person in this situation, which is quite scary to me, as I think there are a lot of things are epistemically iffy in the AI safety community. For example: * A lot of the most viral pro-AIS people (especially the ones that are relatively new to the field) seem to not be reasoning especially carefully * The field’s hiring process is quite insular * Not enough time is spent engaging with a lot of good faith disagreements (imo) * Fieldbuilding strategy doesn’t optimize for careful reasoning amongst those it recruits * People receive lots of social/material benefits for continuing to believe that AI risk is the most important thing and work on it * Even under some of the shortest timelines and most speculative capabilities that superintelligence might have, I really don’t extinction within the next year should be assigned any notable probability mass, due to the need for data centers to be replenished I also see a lot of disagreements that I think are poorly reasoned. For example:  * Poor application of/thinking about EV when conceptualizing risks * Psychoanalysis that doesn’t explain the safety community’s behaviors well * Comments significantly overstating the case for something * Arguments without the slightest amount of research into what the other side actually believes Tbh though, most of these critiques apply to both sides. I think this primarily arises because the people working in AI safety who are the most careful reasoners also have the highest opportunity costs, because they tend to be good at other things. This means it’s less valuable for them to write out their thoughts online carefu

AI safety needs people everywhere but quickly stated, current talent bottlenecks to me look like: -- Founders -- Grantmakers -- (technical) Research leads  -- Policy entrepreneurs and implementors (which includes a lot of technical work) -- bets in international coordination and/or cooperation -- All manner of supporting talent -- program leads, ops proper, public outreach, content creators, comms   Most sought-after qualities for talent are: -- context, mission alignment, domain understanding, sophisticated views on AI strategy and threat modelling etc. -- "good judgement", "sound epistemics", "reasoning transparency" and other similar ideas/meta-skills from the EA/rationalist cannon -- a willingness to get shit done/bias for action (rather than be in learning mode, or people who need a lot of management and oversight, or folks with too many preferences/constraints) -- low ego, similar to above -- ambitious folks, since they would be really trying to be their own managers, take on bigger projects, grow themselves and their teams etc.    Finally, even having these, it's not enough to just claim to have these; job-seekers mainly trip up in being able to demonstrate and be legible about having them.

How impactful would it be to copies of @Garrison's new book Obsolete to elected officials who belong to its political target audience (Dems, particularly left ones) and might not have been responsive to traditional x-risk-centric comms (e.g. IABIED)?

Applications to SPAR Fall 2026 are closing tomorrow Aug 18 EOD Anywhere on Earth. SPAR is the ecosystem's biggest AI safety research program, and it's part-time remote. We still have many strong projects across AI safety, AI policy, and biosecurity with very few applications[1], so please consider applying! This round, we also have 18 non-research/generalist projects that people can apply to, and we have much more mentee capacity than previous rounds; we expect to accept around 500 people into the program. If you have friends who have thought about going into AI safety, spread the word! 1. ^ To be specific, as of 2:25 PM PT, we had around 67 projects with fewer than 20 applications total!

Invitation for bets I’m willing to bet that Anthropic’s revenue growth over the next year will be slower than its revenue growth over the last 3 years. I proposed a specific bet here. Anyone who wants can offer to take the other side of that bet. Or you can make a counteroffer. I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble. I proposed a specific bet for that, too, here. Feel free to offer to take the other side of that bet or make a counteroffer. I’d also be open to other bets. It seems pointless to bet about whether AGI or transformative AI will be deployed within the next 5-10 years, yet, for the heck of it, I would agree to a bet against that, too. (I’ll make bets for small, nominal amounts of money to be donated to the winner’s charity of choice, since the practical and legal problems with betting are too large otherwise.) I’d also bet against the deployment of 100,000+ SAE Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles in North America within the next 3 years, if anyone has a strong opinion on that. I’d make a similar bet against the deployment of autonomous humanoid robots in North American households, although we’d have to come up with some specific resolution criteria. Similarly, I’d bet against any significant level of near-term labour automation by LLMs or generative AI. Or against LLMs becoming capable of performing all sorts of specific tasks well. On any of these topics, I’m also open to invitations for a public dialogue. (More on that topic here.) ---------------------------------------- Edit (2026-07-12 at 21:55 UTC): I’m still open to bets. If you’re interested, please contact me on Substack or by email.

Mildly against the Longtermism --> GCR shift Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain, somewhat rambly TL;DR replacing longtermism with GCRs might get more resources to longtermist causes, but at the expense of non-GCR longtermist interventions and broader community epistemics Over the last ~6 months I've noticed a general shift amongst EA orgs to focus less on reducing risks from AI, Bio, nukes, etc based on the logic of longtermism, and more based on Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs) directly. Some data points on this: * Open Phil renaming it's EA Community Growth (Longtermism) Team to GCR Capacity Building * This post from Claire Zabel (OP) * Giving What We Can's new Cause Area Fund being named "Risk and Resilience," with the goal of "Reducing Global Catastrophic Risks" * Longview-GWWC's Longtermism Fund being renamed the "Emerging Challenges Fund" * Anecdotal data from conversations with people working on GCRs / X-risk / Longtermist causes My guess is these changes are (almost entirely) driven by PR concerns about longtermism. I would also guess these changes increase the number of people donation / working on GCRs, which is (by longtermist lights) a positive thing. After all, no-one wants a GCR, even if only thinking about people alive today. Yet, I can't help but feel something is off about this framing. Some concerns (no particular ordering): 1. From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, there's a huge difference between ~99% and 100% of the population dying, if humanity recovers in the former case, but not the latter. Just looking at GCRs on their own mostly misses this nuance. * (see Parfit Reasons and Persons for the full thought experiment) 2. From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, preventing a GCR doesn't differentiate between "humanity prevents GCRs and realises 1% of it's potential" and "humanity prevents GCRs realises 99% of its potential" * Preventing an extinction-level GCR might move u

In two days (March 21st, 12-4pm), about 140 of us (event link) will be marching on Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in SF asking the CEOs to make statements on whether they would stop developing new frontier models if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same. This comes after Anthropic removed its commitment to pause development from their RSP. We'll be starting at 500 Howard St, San Francisco (Anthropic's Office, full schedule and more info here). This is shaping to be the biggest US AI Safety protest to date, with a coalition including Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor) and folks representing PauseAI, QuitGPT, Humans First.