EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Introduction

Vetted Causes writes reviews of charities. Thus far, we have published reviews of two charities. In both cases, we did not reach out to the charities before publishing reviews on them. We did consider doing so for our most recent review, but did not due to concerns which we've described below.

We hope that through this post, members of the community can offer solutions that resolve our concerns. Should this happen, we would be more than happy to send reviews to charities before releasing them going forward.

Acknowledging The Potential Benefits of Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews on Them

We would like to start by acknowledging some of the potential benefits of reaching out to charities before publishing reviews on them:

• Charities could inform us of hidden information that we were not able to access.
• Charities could inform us of public information [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) Introduction

(00:44) Acknowledging The Potential Benefits of Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews on Them

(01:22) Potential Risks of Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews About Them

(01:43) Risk 1: Charities could alter, conceal, fabricate and/or destroy evidence to cover their tracks.

(03:44) Risk 2: Unconscious biases from interacting with charity staff.

(04:28) Other Reasons

(04:42) Reason 1: Organizations should be held accountable for serious mistakes.

(05:58) Reason 2: Organizations should be incentivized to provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence to justify their important publicly stated claims.

(07:49) Conclusion

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First published:

February 21st, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KnJBoRcWdCmnnmq74/request-for-guidance-reaching-out-to-charities-before

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Hi everyone!

I have just published a report with Convergence Analysis exploring how transformative AI (TAI) could be developed within the next ten years. It's called Pathways to short TAI timelines (pdf version; Google Doc version).

In the report, I examine the debates over compute scaling and recursive improvement as mechanisms for rapid capabilities progress, distill the core elements of these debates under seven distinct scenarios of rapid progress, and ultimately build a case for the plausibility of TAI being developed by 2035.

It's a long read, with the pdf version weighing in at 140 pages. So, in this forum post, I provide excerpts which summarise the text at two different levels of granularity: a short summary (~2 min read) and a detailed overview (~15 min read). For those who are interested in reading further, specific sections of the full-length report (Google Doc version) are [...]

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Outline:

(01:11) Short summary of the report (~2 min read)

(04:07) Detailed overview of the report (~15 min read)

(04:13) Background

(06:18) Two key mechanisms for fast AI capabilities progress

(08:06) Compute scaling

(08:52) Short timelines via compute scaling

(11:19) Counterarguments to short timelines via compute scaling

(15:59) Recursive improvement

(17:29) Short timelines via recursive improvement

(22:18) Counterarguments to short timelines via recursive improvement

(26:09) Seven scenarios with short TAI timelines

(33:55) Conclusion

(35:11) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

February 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Aex6kac5KPbsQ7K3N/published-report-pathways-to-short-tai-timelines

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting extreme poverty, and Founders Pledge, a global nonprofit empowering entrepreneurs to do the most good possible with their charitable giving, have announced today the formation of their Rapid Response Fund.

In the face of imminent federal funding cuts, the Fund will ensure that some of the world's highest-impact charities and programs can continue to function. Affected organizations include those offering critical interventions, particularly in basic health services, maternal and child health, infectious disease control, mental health, domestic violence, and organized crime.

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First published:

February 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D4mdW9hQs32mo2xkQ/the-life-you-can-save-and-founders-pledge-launch-rapid

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a quick take, not a research report, reflecting the current thoughts and impressions of (some) members of Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team. We plan to occasionally post views we have (like this one) that we think are important but which we haven't had time to focus on in depth.

Evaluating AI systems for morally relevant properties like agency and consciousness is presently quite challenging. AI systems are complex and our understanding of their functioning remains rudimentary. Human and animal brains are, if anything, even less well understood. Coming up with verdicts on the presence of traits like valenced experience or morally-weighty desires involves distilling expert opinion, largely formulated in terms of humans and other animals, and applying the lessons derived to what we know about AI systems. Doing this well requires thought and conceptual nuance, and even in the ideal will leave us with significant uncertainty.

[...]

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Outline:

(02:06) 1) Increasing secrecy

(05:51) 2) Wider exploration

(08:10) 3) AI-driven innovation

(11:37) Implications

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First published:

February 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/axHwbeiKA4ScDHik3/worrisome-trends-for-digital-mind-evaluations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

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.

I'm in San Francisco until February 27th or so. If you'd like to meet up or tell me about some cool event, email me at tgarrisonlovely [at] gmail [dot] com.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei may have divulged a big secret with worrying implications for AI firms like his own and OpenAI.

Last month, Chinese startup DeepSeek released R1, an AI model rivalling OpenAI's flagship o1 model on key benchmarks but at a fraction of the cost — about 27-times cheaper. This sent shockwaves through the market. AI [...]

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First published:

February 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/crzuEFphTSv6EwYns/deepseek-made-it-even-harder-for-us-ai-companies-to-ever

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This is a link post.

Hi everyone,

We recently discovered some information about the charity Sinergia Animal, and were pretty shocked by what we found.

We hope you find time to read our article.

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First published:

February 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YYrC2ZR5pnrYCdSLt/sinergia-ace-top-charity-makes-false-claims-about-helping

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In Q4 we ran the second tournament in the AI Benchmarking Series which aims to assess how the best bots compare to the best humans on real-world forecasting questions, like those found on Metaculus. Over the quarter we had 44 bots compete for $30,000 on 402 questions with a team of ten Pros serving as a human benchmark on 122 of those 402. We found that:

• Metaculus Pro Forecasters were better than the top bot “team” (a team of one, this quarter), but not with statistical significance (p = 0.079) using log scoring with a weighted t-test.
• Top bot performance improved relative to the Pro benchmark to a -8.9 head-to-head score in Q4 2024, compared to a -11.3 head-to-head score in Q3 2024, although this improvement is not statistically significant. (A higher score indicates greater relative accuracy. A score of 0 corresponds to equal accuracy.)

These main results [...]

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Outline:

(03:55) Selecting a Bot Team

(08:17) Comparing the Bots to Pros

(12:26) Calibration

(14:08) Discrimination

(15:45) Comparing Individual Bots to the Pros

(16:19) Metaculus Bots

(17:56) The best bot: pgodzinai

(21:04) Trends in Winners

(23:29) Discussion

(25:12) Can you make a winning bot?

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First published:

February 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TG2zCDCozMcDLgoJ5/metaculus-q4-ai-benchmarking-bots-are-closing-the-gap

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Applications are currently open for the next cohort of AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in August 2025. We've just published our in-depth research reports on the new ideas for charities we're recommending for people to launch through the program. This article provides an introduction to each idea, and a link to the full report. You can learn more about these ideas in our upcoming Q&A with Morgan Fairless, AIM's Director of Research, on February 26th.

Advocacy for used lead-acid battery recycling legislation

Full report: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/reports/lead-battery-recycling-advocacy

Description

Lead-acid batteries are widely used across industries, particularly in the automotive sector. While recycling these batteries is essential because the lead inside them can be recovered and reused, it is also a major source of lead exposure—a significant environmental health hazard. Lead exposure can cause severe cardiovascular and cognitive development issues, among other health problems.

The risk is especially [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) Advocacy for used lead-acid battery recycling legislation

(00:57) Description

(02:17) Counterfactual impact

(03:03) Potential for success

(05:12) Neglectedness

(06:15) Additional Considerations

(07:30) Scaling up Kangaroo Care

(08:50) Potential for success

(09:52) Neglectedness

(10:12) Additional Considerations

(10:47) Differentiated Learning

(11:38) Counterfactual impact

(12:31) Potential for success

(13:44) Additional Considerations

(16:50) Mass Communication for Education

(17:26) Counterfactual impact

(18:38) Potential for success

(19:50) Neglectedness

(20:28) Additional Considerations

(22:02) Establishing a Livelihoods Evaluator

(22:38) Counterfactual impact

(23:21) Potential for success

(25:16) Additional Considerations

(28:15) Excited about these ideas?

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

February 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B7Hrny34hCdf8bcFT/lead-batteries-differential-learning-and-livelihoods-aim-s-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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[Launch post of the funding circle here for those who want a bit more context]

The Strategic Animal Funding Circle (a new group of donors supporting high-impact farmed animal advocacy) is running its second round of grantmaking.

You can see the full Request for Proposals and application guidance here. The deadline to apply is March 10th. I'll share some information below on what kinds of groups might be a good fit (for context, we had approx. 150 applicants last round and funded 11 groups).

If there are any donors (either currently giving or willing to give upwards of $100-250k to farmed animals per year) interested in joining, feel free to email me at jozden[at]mobius.life. We expect the funding circle will expose donors to more high-impact opportunities, create the space for important discussions and reduce vetting inefficiencies.

Notes on the kinds of groups we are looking for, from [...]

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Outline:

(01:01) Notes on the kinds of groups we are looking for, from our RFP:

(01:58) Areas we funded in our last round

(02:49) Areas we are open to funding

(02:59) Areas we are not considering this round

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First published:

February 17th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HntPPrXyLLTJjfpiq/strategic-animal-funding-circle-round-2-is-now-live

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm writing this in my personality capacity as someone who recently began working at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism—my colleagues might see things differently and haven’t reviewed this post.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence could prove to be one of the most consequential technological transitions in human history. As we approach what may be a critical period in AI development, we face urgent questions about governance, safety standards, and the concentration of power in AI development.

Yet many in the general public are not aware of the speed of AI development, nor the implications powerful AI models could have for them or society at large. Society's capacity to carefully examine and publicly debate AI issues lags far behind their importance.

This post makes the case for why journalism on AI is an important yet neglected path to remedy this situation.

AI journalism has a lot [...]

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Outline:

(00:56) AI journalism has a lot of potential

(03:53) The state of AI journalism

(05:04) Building the next generation of AI journalists

(06:57) The Tarbell Fellowship

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

February 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bYrh5CMhmGDohjztD/the-case-for-journalism-on-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.