LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“AI Safety as a YC Startup” by Lukas Petersson


Listen Later

A while back I gave a talk about doing AI safety as a YC startup. I wrote a blog post about it and thought it would be interesting to share it with both the YC and AI safety communities. Please share any feedback or thoughts. I would love to hear them!

AI Safety is a problem and people pay to solve problems

Intelligence is dangerous, and I think there's a significant chance that the default scenario of AI progress poses an existential risk to humanity. While it's far from certain, even small probabilities are significant when the stakes are this high. This is an enormous abstract problem, but there are thousands of sub-problems waiting to be solved.

Some of these sub-problems already exist today, but most are in the future (GPT is not capable of killing us yet). When people start feeling these pains, they will [...]

---

Outline:

(00:22) AI Safety is a problem and people pay to solve problems

(01:24) More startups should solve these problems

(02:39) Y Combinator

(04:23) YC advice in the context of AI safety

(04:39) The problems they are solving are in the future

(05:13) Customers are often researchers from AI labs or from the government

(05:54) The pool of potential customers is often small

(06:54) Doing good

---

First published:

January 8th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxJFjqT6oFY3jo47s/ai-safety-as-a-yc-startup-1

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,332 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,396 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

7,960 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,130 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

87 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,447 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

8,761 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

88 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

356 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,399 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,313 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

469 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

123 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

76 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

444 Listeners