Just Compute: an idea for a highly scalable AI nonprofit

Just Compute is a 501c3 organization whose mission is to buy cutting-edge chips and distribute them to academic researchers and nonprofits doing research for societal benefit. Researchers can apply to Just Compute to get access to the JC cluster, which supports research in AI safety, AI for good, AI for science, AI ethics, and the like, through a transparent and streamlined process. It's a lean nonprofit organization with a highly ambitious founder who seeks to raise billions of dollars for compute. 

The case for Just Compute is fairly robust: it supports socially valuable AI research and creates opportunities for good researchers to work in AI for social benefit and without having to join a scaling lab. And because frontier capabilities are compute constrained, it also slows down the frontier by using up a portion of the total available compute. The sales case for it is very strong, as it attracts a wide variety of donors interested in supporting AI research in the academy and at nonprofits. Donors can even earmark their donations for specific areas of research, if they'd like, perhaps with a portion of the donations mandatorily allocated to whatever JC sees as the most important area of AI research.

If a pair of co-founders wanted to launch this project, I think it could be a very cool moonshot!

I think this is true, but also having a successful for profit that achieves some of the goals you set out is an inherently narrower set of skills because you need to do market research, product market fit, customer relations, p/l, find ways to scale teams and products, etc. These are skills that need to be learned whereas for nonprofit work you can just do your research or whatever. Some of them involve a bunch of soft skills and types of scale/customer mindset I don't commonly see in EA. 

I think this is a good thing to have in the toolkit and has been underleveraged in the past, so I'm glad you posted this. But imo the stronger considerations for most EAs are that they are likely a poor personal fit for for-profit work (especially given that prior experience is the biggest predictor of success) and capital incentives are very hard to align with most impactful aims. 

I'd be excited to see 1-2 opportunistic EA-rationalist types looking into where marginal deregulation is a bottleneck to progress on x-risk/GHW, circulating 1-pagers among experts in these areas, and then pushing the ideas to DOGE/Mercatus/Executive Branch. I'm thinking things like clinical trials requirements for vaccines, UV light, anti-trust issues facing companies collaborating on safety and security, maybe housing (though I'm not sure which are bottlenecked by federal action). For most of these there's downside risk if the message is low fidelity, the issue becomes polarized, or priorities are poorly set, hence collaborating with experts. I doubt there's that much useful stuff to be done here, but marginal deregulation looks very easy right now and looks good to strike while the iron is hot. 

I think these are fair points, I agree the info hazard stuff has smothered a lot of talent development and field building, and I agree the case for x-risk from misaligned advanced AI is more compelling. At the same time, I don't talk to a lot of EAs and people in the broader ecosystem these days who are laser focused on extinction over GCR, that seems like a small subset of the community. So I expect various social effects, making a bunch more money, and AI being really cool and interesting and fast-moving are probably a bigger deal than x-risk compellingness simpliciter. Or at least they have had a bigger effect on my choices!

But insufficiently successful talent development / salience / comms is probably the biggest thing, I agree.

Yup! The highest level plan is in Kevin Esvelt's "Delay, Detect, Defend": use access controls and regulation to delay worst-case pandemics, build a nucleic acid observatory and other tools to detect amino acid sequences for superpandemics, and defend by hardening the world against biological attacks.

The basic defense, as per DDD, is:

• Develop and distribute adequate PPE to all essential workers
• Make sure the supply chain is robust to ensure that essential workers can distribute food and essential supplies in the event of a worst-case pandemic
• Environmental defenses like far-UVC that massively reduce the spread and replication rate of pandemic pathogens

IMO "delay" has so far basically failed but "detect" has been fairly successful (though incompletely). Most of the important work now needs to rapidly be done on the "defend" side of things.

There's a lot more details on this and the biosecurity community has really good ideas now about how to develop and distribute effective PPE and rapidly scale environmental defenses. There's also now interest in developing small molecule countermeasures that can stop pandemics early but are general enough to stop a lot of different kinds of biological attacks. A lot of this is bottlenecked by things like developing industrial-scale capacity for defense production or solving logistics around supply chain robustness and PPE distribution. Happy to chat more details or put you in touch with people better suited than me if it's relevant to your planning.

AIxBio looks pretty bad and it would be great to see more people work on it

• We're pretty close to having a country of virologists in a data center with AI models that can give detailed and accurate instructions for all steps of a biological attack — with recent reasoning models, we might have this already
• These models have safeguards but they're trivial to overcome — Pliny the Liberator manages to jailbreak every new model within 24 hours and open sources the jailbreaks
• Open source will continue to be just a few months behind the frontier given distillation and amplification, and these can be fine-tuned to remove safeguards in minutes for less than $50
• People say it's hard to actually execute the biology work, but I don't see any bottlenecks to bioweapon production that can't be done by a bio undergrad with limitless scientific knowledge; on my current understanding, the bottlenecks are not manual dexterity bottlenecks like playing a violin which require years of practice, they are knowledge bottlenecks
• Bio supply chain controls that make it harder to get ingredients aren't working and aren't on track to work
• So it seems like we're very close to democratizing (even bespoke) bioweapons. When I talk to bio experts about this they often reassure me that few people want to conduct a biological attack, but I haven't seen much analysis on this and it seems hard to be highly confident.

While we gear up for a bioweapon democracy it seems that there are very few people working on worst-case bio, and most of the people working on it are working on access controls and evaluations. But I don't expect access controls to succeed, and I expect evaluations to mostly be useful for scaring politicians, due in part to the open source issue meaning we just can't give frontier models robust safeguards. The most likely thing to actually work is biodefense.

I suspect that too many people working on GCR have moved into working on AI alignment and reliability issues and too few are working on bio. I suspect there are bad incentives, given that AI is the new technology frontier and working with AI is good career capital, and given that AI work is higher status.

When I talk to people at the frontier of biosecurity, I learn that there's a clear plan and funding available, but the work is bottlenecked by entrepreneurial people who can pick up a big project and execute on it autonomously — these people don't even need a bio background. On my current guess, the next 3-5 such people who are ambivalent about what to do should go into bio rather than AI, in part because AI seems to be more bottlenecked by less generalist skills, like machine learning, communications, and diplomacy.

Very glad to see this coming out. Your team's research has convinced me that if exponential AI progress doesn't lead to a kind of above replacement fertility, where we can supplement biological humans with digital ones in all the relevant senses, then turning the spike into a steady climb will be one of the most important global priorities in the years ahead. 

For what it's worth, I do specifically have power-law shaped intuitions about the value of pleasure as you arrange matter to optimize for it more and more. But I agree with you both, I didn't argue for this and it's not important to my core point. 

Sure, there are various ways to do this. Scale up ems, for example, or build superintelligence from symbolic systems with strong verifiability guarantees, for starters.