Is there a camp of people who think that there is no "secret sauce"? For example, they might argue that ChatGPT is basically how intelligence works, when something like that is placed in the human body we collectively do all the wonders of the modern world. In chimps, not so much maybe because they can't talk. In computers, they get the ability to chat like us. There is no secret sauce, just statistical pattern matching wired to a set of biological or digital APIs.

Can someone please explain why we're still forecasting the weak AGI timeline? I thought "sparks" of AGI as Microsoft claimed GPT-4 achieved should already be more than the level of intelligence implied by "weak".

Re "consider working on foundational AI forecasting questions as an alternative", what opportunities are available for people who are interested?

No comment on whether it's best to contact through connections, but I think the best person for contacting through connections is Benjamin Todd, who according to this post, speaks basic conversational Chinese, had lived for almost a year in China, and had been doing research into the intersection between effective altruism in China over the year before 2018.

Due to these highly relevant experiences, and his caution about translating EA materials into Chinese, most such efforts were delayed for many years. He has been without doubt the most influential China expert in our community!

A high real rate doesn’t necessarily imply a high nominal rate, it could also come with huge deflation, in which case shorting government debt won’t get you anywhere.

I don't disagree but I also don't find them evidently true.

For a beginner billionaire of precisely $1b net worth, why is giving away $900m and only spending $100m not the best thing for wellbeing? How to do better?

And why is spending on reputation-boosting donations better than on luxuries? I get that donations to effective charities are better, but other donations can be orders of magnitudes less effective. On the other hand, luxury brands like LV and Hermès have a gross profit margin of around 70%, buying them is essentially a wealth transfer to the brands' owners, who usually engage in substantial philanthropic activities. Maybe their activities are more effective to offset the cost of goods?

Why does Anthropic have a valuation at all? "Anthropic is a public benefit corporation", according to its homepage. Is it still allowed then to distribute profits?

I deep-dived into crypto in the latter half of 2020 because I was curious what was going on there. It took me a few months to see but what's said in the top-level comment were basically all true back then. I started my learning from scratch with an open mind, I would imagine had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see.

New to EA Hong Kong but already familiar with EA? Start here!

Here is the link to the book hosted on a Chinese website, with further links to the chapters. I had a poor experience reading on that website but unfortunately I was unable to find a more pleasant one.