It somehow completely fails to cover Leverage deploying spies into other organizations and trying to take over CEA

I’ve heard this claim from Habryka and others many times and nobody seems to be willing to go on the record to back it up. He does not really think to ask that perhaps Lydia also heard about these rumours and was unable to substantiate them with the rigour required of a published magazine article either.

At least to just satisfy my curiosity, can someone involved privately DM me and explain what this means and provide some evidence for it?

(I otherwise fully agree with Habryka’s assessment that this article feels waaaaay too credible about Leverage and seems to be mostly doing image rehabilitation, from someone who is simply too personally close to the story to be believable as a third-party observer)

(Just realising I am developing an eye for AI-generated graphics now, to complement my eye for AI-generated text, images, and videos. There’s something so familiar about this style.)

I was never accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship programme, but I was able to land a high-impact role at one (now leading it!), by getting in touch with other founders. For me, this is no less rewarding than being the real founder, and enough people treat me as if I went through the programme that it’s usually a surprise to people that I didn’t.

So I would urge some people to reconsider if founding is exactly what you want, you may be able to derive almost all of the benefits via a slightly different path, and CE’s charities would very much welcome talented founder-type generalists in high-level leadership & ownership roles!

🔱 Please choose a slightly heavier weight for the font 🔱

We’ve started the process of creating a brand new codebase for the forum built on NextJS

I initially balked at rewrite syndrome, but thinking again, I think LLMs probably do really change the calculus of it. I like that you announced this by showing the proof of it in the new post page design!

A lot of modern training data isn’t stolen, though. There are organisations which recruit people to do their jobs normally and screen share, or provide worked-through examples of their work, and this is increasingly making up the bulk of the data that’s used to pull frontier models ahead of others on work benchmarks. People are being paid for this and do it willingly, usually with knowledge of where their labour outputs are going!

So really, the problem is a subset of workers in each field are ‘defecting’ (to use a rat term I kinda loathe). How do you create solidarity among groups of workers to prevent a small number of them from putting the others out of work? Or, if technological progress is to be necessary, how do those groups of workers politically agitate for a welfare state and good ongoing education?

The left solved this problem two hundred years ago, but I suspect EA won’t like the solution…

(Just contributing by adding that yeah, GiveDirectly’s fund works because Yemen is so dominantly muslim that the odds of going to a non-Muslim are basically nil). Even in Nigeria, the additional cost of trying to achieve Zakat compliance for a non-cash-or-in-kind-transfer charity may hamper expansion beyond the supermajority states enough to not be worth it. Unsure.

Always loved your work, but fully understand the decision. Thank you for it!

One thing which is unclear to me is, why aren’t these users counterfactually using free commercial offerings? Price is clearly not a barrier, is it just language? And why, then, wouldn’t a frontier lab be well-positioned to capture that market?

During the OpenAI board fiasco, we saw a large number of employees exert pressure on OpenAI to re-form under Sam Altman, suggesting labour power in AI labs is real and effective. Companies do have a hard time shutting themselves down for no reason, but have a much easier time scapegoating labour unions and strikes. And it’s relatively inexpensive to build a labour union, and easy to do when talent is scarce. Just sayin’