We also encourage you to share this opportunity with others who may be a good fit. If we accept any fellow we contacted based on your recommendation, you'll receive $100 for each accepted candidate. The recommendation form is here. 

Hi Oscar, thanks for the question! To clarify, only the fellowship has moved to the UK, not our entire organisation.

We've thought a lot about the pros and cons of moving from Switzerland and largely agree with your points.^[1] The main driver for our decision was Switzerland's comparatively small GCR network.

We see the fellowship as an opportunity to immerse fellows in a rich intellectual environment, which London’s – and especially LISA’s – GCR ecosystem offers. Our experience of running fellowships outside of established hubs suggests that fellowships alone are not a great vehicle to build a new GCR hub due to their seasonal nature and limited ability to retain people long-term. Nevertheless, we do see significant value in diversification and are considering future projects outside established GCR hubs for this reason.

Hope this explains our thinking, happy to answer more questions.

1. ^{^}

   Mentor access isn't a huge concern for us, since we expect most mentor-mentee interactions to happen virtually either way.

"Profits for investors in this venture [ETA: OpenAI] were capped at 100 times their investment (though thanks to a rule change this cap will rise by 20% a year starting in 2025)."

I stumbled upon this quote in this recent Economist article [archived] about OpenAI. I couldn't find any good source that supports the claim additionally, so this might not be accurate. The earliest mention I could find for the claim is from January 17th 2023 although it only talks about OpenAI "proposing" the rule change.

If true, this would make the profit cap less meaningful, especially for longer AI timelines. For example, a 1 billion investment in 2023 would be capped at ~1540 times in 2040.

• Require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests. 

Would the information in this quote fall under any of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions, particularly those concerning national security or confidential commercial information/trade secrets? Or would there be other reasons why it wouldn't become public knowledge through FOIA requests?

As far as I understand the plan is for it to be a (sort of?) national/governmental institute.^[1] The UK government has quite a few scientific institutes. It might be the first in the world of that kind.

1. ^{^}

   In this article from early October, the phrasing implies that it would be tied to the UK government:

   Sunak will use the second day of Britain's upcoming two-day AI summit to gather “like-minded countries” and executives from the leading AI companies to set out a roadmap for an AI Safety Institute, according to five people familiar with the government’s plans.

   The body would assist governments in evaluating national security risks associated with frontier models, which are the most advanced forms of the technology.

   The idea is that the institute could emerge from what is now the United Kingdom’s government’s Frontier AI Taskforce[...].

Thanks for the context, didn't know that!

GiveWell didn't lose $900 million to fraud. GiveDirectly lost $900'000 to fraud.

My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA

I'd be surprised [p<0.1] if EA was not a significant focus of the Michael Lewis book – but agree that it's unlikely to be the major topic. Many leaders at FTX and Alameda Research are closely linked to EA. SBF often, and publically, said that effective altruism was a big reason for his actions. His connection to EA is interesting both for understanding his motivation and as a story-telling element. There are Manifold prediction markets on whether the book would mention 80'000h (74%), Open Philanthropy (74%), and Give Well (80%), but these markets aren't traded a lot and are not very informative.^[1]

This video titled The Fake Genius: A $30 BILLION Fraud (2.8 million views, posted 3 weeks ago) might give a glimpse of how EA could be handled. The video touches on EA but isn't centred on it. It discusses the role EAs played in motivating SBF to do earning to give, and in starting Alameda Research and FTX. It also points out that, after the fallout at Alameda Research, 'higher-ups' at CEA were warned about SBF but supposedly ignored the warnings. Overall, the video is mainly interested in the mechanisms of how the suspected fraud happened, where EA is only one piece of the puzzle. One can equally get a sense of "EA led SBF to do fraud" as "SBF used EA as a front to do fraud".

ETA:
The book description^[2] "mentions "philanthropy", makes it clear that it's mainly about SBF and not FTX as a firm, and describes the book as partly a psychological portrait.

1. ^{^}

   I also created a similar market for CEA, but with 2 mentions as the resolving criteria. One mention is very likely as SBF worked briefly for them.

2. ^{^}

   "In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone."