The frontpage currently has a banner up where people can leave a heart with a comment when they have finished their donations. The comments will be cross-posted here.

However, you can also post on this thread any time, especially with longer explanations of where you have given this year, and why.

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First published:

December 23rd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Phc2fdE6mKnQGNFsc/donation-celebration-post

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Project summary

AI Safety Camp has a seven-year track record of enabling participants to try their fit, find careers and start new orgs in AI Safety. We host up-and-coming researchers outside the Bay Area and London hubs.

If this fundraiser passes…

• $15k, we won’t run a full program, but can facilitate 10 projects.
• $40k, we can organise the 11th edition, for 25 projects.
• $70k, we can pay a third organiser, for 35 projects.
• $300k, we can cover stipends for 40 projects.
   

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

❝ By all accounts they are the gold standard for this type of thing. Everyone says they are great, I am generally a fan of the format, I buy that this can punch way above its weight or cost. If I was going to back [an AI Safety talent funnel organisation] [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Project summary

(00:54) What are this projects goals? How will you achieve them?

(03:35) How will this funding be used?

(07:09) Who is on your team?

(08:13) Whats your track record?

(12:14) What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

(13:03) How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

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First published:

December 23rd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JcWbvECTj9zowFu7N/funding-case-ai-safety-camp-11

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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tl;dr: I'm having a hard time convincing myself that any of the top animal welfare charities are really as effective as I want them to be, and I'm seeking feedback on my thought process as I figure out where to donate in my first time.

I've been interested in effective altruism for years, and I'm finally in a place where I can start donating considerable sums of money. I'm interested in both global health & development and animal welfare. I'm not interested in longtermism. That's a long topic for another day. While I feel like I understand global health & development pretty well and I've made up my mind to donate to Givewell's Top Charities fund, I have a lot of open questions about animal welfare, and I'd like some help in thinking through these topics. In this post, I will explain where I currently am in my thought [...]

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Outline:

(02:07) Corporate Outreach

(05:00) Advocacy for Plant-based diets

(07:38) The Rest

(07:41) Faunalytics

(08:01) Legal Impact for Chickens

(08:33) Wild Animals Initiative

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First published:

December 23rd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PHzqiH3ohskuCaTbM/reservations-about-donating-for-animal-welfare-charities

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I was recently talking to someone who had recently started thinking

about effective altruism, and was trying to figure out how to work it

into their life. They were established in their career, it paid

well, and their background wasn't obviously a good fit for

direct

work, so they were naturally considering

earning to

give. This prompts a question of how much to give.

"How much?" is a question people have struggled with for a very long

time. Donating 10% of income has a long history, and it's

common for EAs to pledge to do this;

donating 2.5% of wealth is also traditional. If

you're earning to give, however, you might want to give more: Julia

and I have been giving 50%; Allan Saldanha

has been giving 75%

since

2019. How should one decide?

I was hoping there were good EA blog posts on this topic [...]

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First published:

December 24th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MiqTRfvi5DGL5TZSD/how-much-to-give-is-a-pragmatic-question

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

My median expectation is that AGI[1] will be created 3 years from now. This has implications on how to behave, and I will share some useful thoughts I and others have had on how to orient to short timelines.

I’ve led multiple small workshops on orienting to short AGI timelines and compiled the wisdom of around 50 participants (but mostly my thoughts) here. I’ve also participated in multiple short-timelines AGI wargames and co-led one wargame.

This post will assume median AGI timelines of 2027 and will not spend time arguing for this point. Instead, I focus on what the implications of 3 year timelines would be.

I didn’t update much on o3 (as my timelines were already short) but I imagine some readers did and might feel disoriented now. I hope this post can help those people and others in thinking about how to plan for 3 year [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) A story for a 3 year AGI timeline

(03:45) Important variables based on the year

(03:57) The pre-automation era (2025-2026).

(04:56) The post-automation era (2027 onward).

(06:05) Important players

(08:03) Prerequisites for humanity's survival which are currently unmet

(11:22) Robustly good actions

(15:18) Final thoughts

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 22nd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tdfDfFyqbvBF9DdeY/orienting-to-3-year-agi-timelines

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers or people who provided feedback.

Summary

• I investigate whether saving human lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria may be harmful accounting for the meat-eater problem, i.e. the nearterm increase in farmed animal suffering caused by increasing income or population.
• I estimate a random person globally, and in China, India and Nigeria in 2022 caused 15.5, 34.6, 5.17 and 2.31 times as much suffering to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as the person's happiness. Moreover, I expect the meat-eater problem in those countries to become worse in the nearterm as their real gross domestic product (real GDP) per capita increases. So my results suggest extending human lives there is harmful in the nearterm.
• GiveWell has made 1.09 billion dollars of grants impacting people in the countries I mentioned. Ambitious Impact has incubated 8 organisations whose 1st target country was one I mentioned, and [...]

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Outline:

(00:17) Summary

(02:59) Introduction

(03:21) Methods

(06:50) Results

(07:07) Discussion

(07:10) Meat-eater problem

(12:05) Suggestions

(15:41) Carbon and farmed animal welfare footprint

(18:15) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 22nd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FqioYEr97eoCQMxhk/givewell-may-have-made-1-billion-dollars-of-harmful-grants

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This past term EA Northeastern's London group revamped our Arete (ie. intro) fellowship in a few significant ways. This is how it went!

(tldr: We added a project into the intro fellowship and invested more time into personal relationships with fellows. We had lower drop out rates and higher engagement.[1] You can see this google sheet if you want the numbers.)

If you want to compare our experience to yours here is some context:

• Our group is 3 years old.
• There's appx. 2000 students at the London campus, all inclusive.
• Appx. 1250 of those at any given time are freshmen studying abroad from Boston.

The primary problems we had last year were:

1. Attendance drop off.
2. ‘Apprehensive’ participation in meetings.
3. Low engagement with the group (& EA) outside of the fellowship.

The following are changes that we made from last year to address them.

We Added a [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) We Added a Project

(04:53) We Designed New Marketing Materials

(05:56) We Made more Friends (awww...)

(09:42) We Improved our Final Event

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 20th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7ge6EPWJHXPyAGg62/running-a-project-based-intro-fellowship

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR) is now accepting mentee applications for Spring 2025! SPAR connects mentors and mentees for three-month AI safety and governance research projects. The Spring 2025 cycle of SPAR will occur virtually between February 10 and May 17, 2025. We have 46 exciting projects available across AI safety, policy, and strategy - you can click here to explore the projects!

Apply now

SPAR mentee applications are open until January 8th, but we strongly encourage applying early since many mentors review applications on a rolling basis.

As a SPAR mentee, you'll participate in a collaborative research project under an experienced mentor. You might be a good fit if you have a technical/STEM background or a governance/policy background. SPAR projects vary in how much specific knowledge they require.

We think SPAR's value add is that it enables mentors to increase their research output by working with a [...]

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First published:

December 19th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQsEth6kgn6wHx6c/apply-now-to-spar

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

The AI safety community has grown rapidly since the ChatGPT wake-up call, but available funding doesn’t seem to have kept pace.

However, there's a more recent dynamic that's created even better funding opportunities, which I witnessed as a recommender in the most recent SFF grant round.[1]

Most philanthropic (vs. government or industry) AI safety funding (>50%) comes from one source: Good Ventures. But they’ve recently stopped funding several categories of work (my own categories, not theirs):

• Many Republican-leaning think tanks, such as the Foundation for American Innovation.
• “Post-alignment” causes such as digital sentience or regulation of explosive growth.
• The rationality community, including LessWrong, Lightcone, SPARC, CFAR, MIRI.
• High school outreach, such as Non-trivial.

In addition, they are currently not funding (or not fully funding):

• Many non-US think tanks, who don’t want to appear influenced by an American organisation (there's now probably more [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 21st, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/s9dyyge6uLG5ScwEp/it-looks-like-there-are-some-good-funding-opportunities-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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See livestream, site, OpenAI thread, Nat McAleese thread.

OpenAI announced (but isn't yet releasing) o3 and o3-mini (skipping o2 because of telecom company O2's trademark). "We plan to deploy these models early next year" (source). "o3 is powered by further scaling up RL beyond o1" (source); I don't know whether it's a new base model.

o3 gets 25% on FrontierMath, smashing the previous SoTA. (These are really hard math problems.) Wow. (The dark blue bar, about 7%, is presumably one-attempt; unfortunately OpenAI didn't say what the light blue bar is, but I think it doesn't really matter and the 25% is for real.[1])

o3 also is easily SoTA on SWE-bench Verified and Codeforces.

It's also easily SoTA on ARC-AGI, after doing RL on the public ARC-AGI problems + when spending $4,000 per task on inference (!).[2]

OpenAI has a "new alignment strategy"; looks like Constitutional AI (and just about [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 20th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aNdg7ctFP9zFcowNd/o3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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