EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.

Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.

Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state [...]

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Advice for AI safety university group organizers.

Acknowledgements

I collected most of these ideas in early January while attending OASIS 4.0, a three-day workshop for AI safety university group organizers in Berkeley, CA. Thank you to everyone who gave their input, and a special thanks to Cole Salvador, Jeremy Kintana, Neav Topaz, Tzu Kit Chan, and Chris Tardy for your feedback on earlier versions of this writeup. The contents of this post don't necessarily reflect the opinion of anyone but myself. All mistakes are my own.

Summary

Given short timelines, AI safety university groups should:

• Prioritize grad students and skilled researchers who could have a meaningful impact within 2-3 years
• Run selective upskilling programs and small, high-context gatherings
• Protect researcher time for those doing impactful work
• Have a succession plan with clear documentation
• Invest in AI governance fieldbuilding and community wellbeing
• Be cautious and coordinated in advocacy [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Acknowledgements

(00:45) Summary

(01:17) Context

(03:05) Resource Allocation

(03:09) High-Priority Activities

(04:06) Technical vs. Governance

(05:47) Time Management

(06:36) Succession Planning

(07:59) Community Building

(08:04) Recommendations

(08:24) Community Support and Wellbeing

(09:41) Advocacy

(09:46) A Word of Caution

(10:51) Potential Activities

(11:29) Should You Stage a Protest?

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We just published an interview: Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui). Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links.

Episode summary

…if the judge thinks that the attorney general is not acting for some political reason, and they really should be, she could appoint a ‘special interest party’…. That's the court saying, “I’m not seeing the public's interest sufficiently protected here.”

— Rose Chan Loui

When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI's restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment.

As nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui explains, the court order set [...]

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Anthropic just published their submission to the Request for Information for a new US AI Action Plan (OSTP RFI).

It's 10 pages total and focuses on strengthening the US AISI (and broadly government capacity to test models), strengthening export controls (with some very concrete proposals), enhancing lab security through standards, scaling up energy infrastructure (asking for building infrastructure for 50 GW of power, or about 4% of the entire US grid capacity), accelerating AI adoption in government, and improving government sensemaking around economic impacts.

I recommend reading it. It's quite insightful regarding the priorities of Anthropic's policy team right now.

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2024 marked 10 years since we launched Open Philanthropy. We spent our first decade learning (about grantmaking, cause selection, and the history of philanthropy), and growing our team and expertise to be able to effectively deploy billions of dollars from Good Ventures, our main funder. Our early grants — and some grantees we’ve helped get started — are now old enough that we can see material signs of our impact in the world.

The start of our second decade also marked a major change in our direction. With Good Ventures approaching the level of spending consistent with its founders’ ambition to spend down in their lifetimes, we finally began to execute at scale on our long-held ambition to support other funders, and found a surprising degree of early success. I expect that our ambition to serve additional partners will guide much of our second decade.

[...]

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This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

If you've been following the headlines about Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, you might think he just suffered a major defeat.

On Tuesday, California District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied all of Musk's requests for a preliminary injunction, which would have blocked OpenAI's restructuring from nonprofit to for-profit. Judge Rogers also expedited the trial, which will now begin this Fall. Media outlets quickly framed this as a loss for Musk.

But a closer reading of the 16-page ruling reveals something more subtle — and still a giant [...]

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Outline:

(02:10) Does Musk have standing?

(05:21) You know who does have standing?

(06:31) Its hard to change your purpose

(07:53) Directors could be personally liable

(09:42) Why OpenAI is trying to restructure

(11:17) What happens next

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Back in September, I was looking up examples of movements who experience "winters" which are then revived. [1]

I found a wonderful 1989 paper [2]covering the post-war activities of the National Woman's Party (NWP). The author argues that the NWP basically kept the feminism movement afloat between suffrage and civil rights victories, and that it played an important role as an "abeyance structure".

I have no formal background in sociology or feminism, but I liked this paper and thought it worth sharing.

Here are a few quotes; some heartwarming, some inspiring and some frankly eery analogies with EA.

From 1945 to the 1960s, women's rights activists confronted an inhospitable political and social environment.
...
The media denounced feminism, discredited women who continued to advocate equality, and thus thwarted the mobilization of discontented women (Rupp 1982). The most influential attack came from Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham's popular [...]

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What you’ll do

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• Overseeing finances, including developing budgets, improving our accounting system, running payroll and preparing [...]

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This is a crosspost for Yes, Shrimp Matter by Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, which was originally published on Asterisk in January 2025.

[Subtitle.] What made a private equity analyst decide to devote his life to tiny aquatic crustaceans?

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those [...]

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Outline:

(02:10) Counting billions

(03:26) What the science says

(05:35) Beyond the water

(09:05) A roadmap to compassion

The original text contained 36 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Summary

This retrospective highlights a letter-writing campaign by Effective Animal Advocacy Australia (EAAA), conducted from September to November 2024, in support of recommended reforms from the Victorian Pig Welfare Inquiry. Our community advocated for the establishment of an Independent Office of Animal Protection and a ban on farrowing crates. Over 50 individuals wrote to 23 Members of Parliament across 24 Victorian regions and districts, resulting in three in-person meetings. Unfortunately this did not result in any immediate policy wins for animals, but we developed relationships with MPs and their offices and received advice and encouragement to continue our advocacy, which has laid the groundwork for future policy windows. As we experienced some challenges in communication and manual organisation, the campaign also provided valuable insights for future initiatives, emphasising the need for improved outreach and automation.

Key lessons 

• Many MPs are supportive of animal issues but have little [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) Summary

(01:10) Key lessons

(02:07) Context

(02:34) Our campaign

(04:37) Results

(05:32) Outcomes of the Inquiry

(06:28) Campaign Workflow

(07:48) Challenges

(10:09) Possible improvements

(10:13) Communication

(10:41) Automation

(12:17) Possible alternative #1

(13:40) Possible alternative #2

(14:26) Future plans

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