I agree that the "ChatGPT" branding for the consumer-facing chatbot doesn't make as much sense given the advent of non-GPT model names.

The model selector, which you have to click in order to select an o-series model as displayed above, is pretty clear though:

Not a major point, but OpenAI officially brands their models “o1” and “o3,” not “GPT-o1” and “GPT-o3.”

A couple sources: Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_o1), OpenAI (https://openai.com/o1/)

There's no public demo yet, but I'll reach out regarding a private one!

@JaimeRV I've been developing a project in this space called Unize (previously Cosmic and Limitless) for the last 2.5 years and am finally gearing up to launch a pre-alpha version this summer! I have a couple of vision articles here if that's of interest. My plan is to get in touch with everyone again once the release is ready. If you'd like to see what it's going to look like or chat about the space in general feel free to DM me!

I had a great chat with Quinn who shared some excellent insights about the space! I'm continuing active work on Cosmic, although it'll probably be at least several months before the alpha is ready, and longer for community features to arrive. We're excited by lots of use cases. Since you run a directory project, one relevant use case is creating organized, interoperable, and collectively updated collections of structured community knowledge, like all of the EA orgs, projects, etc. in existence.

Seems like both of you are working on similar things to what I'm working on at Cosmic and with a few other projects, will send some DMs!

Thanks Yonatan! Perhaps I should have made it clear in my comment, but I have already performed or am in the process of performing these steps, and am aware of this associated validation toolkit (which is one of many possible toolkits to follow when validating an idea) in my roles as an entrepreneur and product manager.

A few other examples in addition to the ones I listed are the Pineapple Operations talent directory and the EA Mental Health directory. I believe that going to publishers first, rather than users, is one way to overcome the network effects, since there is clearly demand on the publisher side, and people are consuming what known publishers are creating. Publishers are then connected with users and are aware of user concerns around information consumption. Going to the commenters reading EA lists is another way to reach users (and is also validation for the idea).

I'm a little worried that blanket statements like "This (meta idea :) ) comes up sometimes, my simplistic answer is that I think it solves a problem that doesn't really exist, or if it does, then I personally don't understand it." immediately discourage the adoption of ideas and could be unhelpful if the idea itself is useful. A similar idea with modest variations, or executed in different ways, could indeed be useful. I'm seeing promising early validation for this idea. I also think it's important to highlight that two people can try to validate the same idea and see drastically different results.

I think that it's incredibly difficult to add features like this to the EA Forum, but I do believe that working on others with this is highly valuable. I happen to be a user of this broad idea in many ways, including not having access to a shared directory of technical talent in EA to find collaborators. If you have any EA CTOs in mind for this idea, please let me know!

In terms of describing a concrete version of this idea, I have a large vision for this, but in short: it would be great to enable people and organizations to publish organized collections of information that are better structured, easy to access, and support a range of contribution systems (including voting and reputation-weighted voting to decide on adding entries). People and organizations currently use Airtable bases, Google Docs/Sheets, and the EA Forum. None of these systems are collaboratively editable, so they're poor for enabling community knowledge. They're also not great for structured knowledge (especially docs and posts) and they're not very user accessible (the broader post mentions easy filtering, for example, which could be better in published Airtable bases).

I believe that the users of this idea have repeatedly popped up, e.g. the many lists of everything that people spend many hours creating (coaches, AI safety organizations, etc.). The issue seems to be that the current tools to manage these things are not adequate. For example, all of these lists are not in a universally discoverable place so it's difficult for people to find. They are either uneditable, or editable by anyone, and both setups are not helpful. If it's uneditable, the content cannot easily be kept up-to-date, and if anyone can edit it, this introduces quality issues. I am not certain if the EA Forum or EA Forum wiki feature are meant for this sort of more arbitrary, less factual content, e.g. projects and projects ideas. This in in fact one of the reasons Golden exists as a competitor to Wikipedia.

Speaking for the US:

My understanding is that books and payroll/finance can in fact be outsourced, and this is common practice. In the US, there are charitable accounting services (like Jitasa) that do all books and file most/all required financial filings for charities (this still requires some work on the charity’s end). There are PEOs (like JustWorks and Insperity) that in some cases run all of HR (and are legally responsible for it). To my understanding PEOs can be used with charitable organizations.

I think there may be some efficiency gains from centralization, like covering fixed costs (such as ~$10,000/year to pay a legal firm to register to fundraise in all US states) but they’re small or insignificant when you reach a multimillion-dollar scale. I’d imagine the all-in gains in avoiding fixed costs to be in the low tens of thousands of dollars.

At a larger scale, becoming independent could even be a cost savings! Administering lots of tiny projects can be operationally burdensome for a fiscal sponsor. There are also benefits of being independent, like being able to use your own operational processes, having a separate legal existence, etc.

That’s why fiscal sponsorship services , e.g. what’s provided by EV and RP, are usually offered to small/burgeoning or temporary projects in the broader charitable world, rather than being used by massive organizations. Accumulated funds at a fiscal sponsor can be easily donated to the new entity, although the later the spin out, the larger the operational complexity I’d imagine.

These days, setting up a company or charity is as easy as filling out a website, no formal legal firm required if it’s pretty standard. Stripe Atlas and Clerky are popular for for-profit startups, and Resilia is one such service for nonprofits.

I agree! As one example, there are large opportunity costs that arise from how savings are being managed: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vuG9x6PNemhCzaMZb/how-you-can-counterfactually-send-millions-of-dollars-to-ea