EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TLDR: AIM won’t run another round of Founding to Give at this time, but we’d be excited for someone else to run (an amended version) of it

AIM launched the Founding to Give program two years ago to incubate for-profit startups with the goal of creating (1) impact via donations and (2) directly through company activities.

Since then, we have run 2 cohorts for which we had over 3,000 applications, selected 38 founders who all pledged 50% of their exit money to effective charities, and launched 24 startups. We’ve been positively surprised at the level of talent we’ve been able to recruit for a program including many repeat founders who have substantial technical expertise or have raised substantial funding in the past. We have been incredibly impressed with the FTG founders, several of whom have gone on to be selected for top tier accelerators such as Entrepreneur First, Antler, YC, and Techstars.

We think that FTG has shown multiple compelling theories of change, but the best versions of those ToCs would take us quite far outside of AIM's main focus in the effective nonprofit space, and require substantially different models/talent profiles/connections relative to AIM's current comparative [...]

---

Outline:

(02:05) What are the most compelling versions of "for-profit impact incubation?"

(05:31) What's next?

(06:25) To finish

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

If you want to skip straight to the video, here it is!

AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI. Check out our channel here.

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board announced that Sam Altman was no longer CEO. Chaos ensued: Sam's self-styled government-in-exile, an employee revolt, key board members ousted, and Sam reinstated within a mere five days. At the time, no one knew the full story. We tell you what we know now.

Here's what else you’ll find:

• A beat-by-beat of almost everything in the dossier used to get Sam fired, and who contributed the evidence.
• An interview with an ex-employee who was there during the firing.
• Details that didn't make it into the books or the news coverage, from off the record conversations with people close to OpenAI
• The one or two concrete steps you can take if this story leaves you wanting to act.

If that sounds exciting to you, watch the video here!

---

Outline:

(00:13) New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman

(00:40) What's in the video?

(01:38) Behind the scenes

(02:41) Why Sam Altman?

(03:42) How you can get involved

(04:16) Channel updates

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Hey all!

The University of Toronto is really large (>100,000 students) and talent-dense.

We think turning the EA group into a thriving community at U of T is high impact, neglected, and very tractable.

1. We’re looking for University of Toronto students who are passionate about EA to join the organizing team to kick-start this community in the fall.
2. We’re currently accepting applications for our virtual summer intro fellowships, where you’ll discuss readings on effective altruism over 8 weeks online, and meet other U of T students who are attending uni with you in the fall.

Currently, the UTEA group runs intro fellowships through the fall and winter semesters, but has no community events beyond that. We think that the community can grow way bigger with more marketing, regular socials, retreats, and talks on high-impact careers.

If you're passionate about effective altruism and would like to help out (we'll be tabling in August), send an email to [email protected].

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it.

A quick note aimed at people going through AIM's incubation programme (or otherwise founding new effective charities), though it may be of broader interest.

I think designing for zakat compliance is an underexplored lever, and being intentional about it early could open up a range of interventions and orgs that wouldn't otherwise get considered. These might not be the most cost-effective options relative to current best-in-class charities, but they have two attractive properties: they're potentially more (or at least differently) scalable, and they aren't competing for the same pool of funding. Zakat is restricted funding, so a zakat-compliant org is tapping a largely separate source rather than dividing the existing effective-giving pie.

The catch is that very few effective charities work on interventions, or in the locations and with muslim-super-majority populations, that could feasibly be zakat-compliant. New Incentives, Spiro, Taimaka, and First Embrace are among the plausible candidates (in addition to GiveDirectly who sometimes run zakat-compliant programs). But even where eligibility is conceivable, none of them are actually compliant right now. A [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Here's Holden Karnofsky:

I tend to think it's worse than 51/49. I tend to think we’re always going to be prone to overestimate how robustly good our actions are. And the more we learn about all the galaxy-brained considerations that one should have had in one's head, the more it's going to be like 50+ε%. I think AI safety is a great cause to work in. I’m excited to work in it. I think it's high impact. I am doing my best to do things that I will be proud to have done and hope for the best. But I really do have to live with the possibility that my ultimate impact on the utilons or whatever is going to be negative.

I’m not aware of a good list of downside risks for AI safety broadly[1], so I decided to make one.

This is not intended to be fully comprehensive, these are just the ones that I personally take seriously[2][3]:

• AI governance interventions are obviously high-variance: bad regulation can easily make things worse, many interventions could increase the risk of great power conflict, increased political polarization around AI could be really bad, more centralization of power increases authoritarianism [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

At every EA conference I go to I end up having long conversations with attendees about my inside-view on what it is like to have kids.

Since I know that a lot of impact-oriented people have questions/interest here, I decided to write up my thoughts in a series of posts that address different angles of how to think about this from my perspective.

First one is linked above - hope you enjoy!

---

First published:

Source:

Linkpost URL:
https://impactpro.substack.com/p/having-kids-as-an-ea-what-i-wish

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

By Deena Mousa, Program Officer, Global Health & Wellbeing Cause Prioritization

AI is progressing rapidly and could have profound implications for the health and wellbeing of people around the world. While global health philanthropy has historically assumed relative continuity with the past, we would like to engage seriously with the potential implications of transformative AI.

This RFP supports rigorous and cost-effective research, policy development, field-building, and implementation focused on improving health and economic outcomes for individuals in measurable ways that are responsive to both the challenges and opportunities that a world transformed by AI might bring. Please see the example projects below.

This RFP is responsive to the possibility that AI reshapes which global health problems are tractable and where the highest-impact opportunities lie. That said, we think the questions core to global health work remain the same: who is helped, by how much, at what cost, and compared to what alternative?

A few examples of what a transformative AI future might look like in terms of R&D and health:

A "compressed 21st century" in biomedicine. AI could compress many decades of biological progress into a few years, delivering cures or effective treatments for a wide range [...]

---

Outline:

(01:15) A few examples of what a transformative AI future might look like in terms of R&D and health:

(02:20) Economic examples:

(03:40) What we're funding

(05:26) How we assess grants

(06:12) How to apply

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

After about seven years, QURI is moving into maintenance mode. This means we’ll ensure that key software (Guesstimate and SquiggleHub) is maintained, but we won’t be developing new software or doing new research.

Background

I started QURI in 2019. At that point I was excited about projects at the intersection of epistemics and software, primarily to be used by impactful researchers. This seemed like a neglected and promising area.

Over the years we developed a small team and worked on a variety of projects. We’ve created multiple tech projects (Foretold, Squiggle, SquiggleHub, RoastMyPost), maintained Guesstimate, and wrote over 90 EA Forum posts. In the background, we’ve collaborated with and consulted for several EA organizations, and done work guiding the nearby forecasting and epistemic space.

The work was challenging, as one might expect. We had a small team. Full-time staff included Nuño Sempere for a few years on research, then Slava Matyuhin on software engineering for Squiggle. For the last year it's mainly been me. I think we were fairly efficient for the team size and budget, but this naturally made it hard to move as quickly as we'd have liked.

Recently I've felt particularly constrained by compute budgets, and [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness”, which I’ll call the unawareness argument.

To that end, this post will:

Argument breakdown

Here's a new framing of the unawareness argument (compared to how I present it in the sequence). I expect this framing to help readers disentangle different types of disagreements they might have, corresponding to three different premises of the argument.

Roughly: What would justify preferring action A over B on impartial altruistic grounds? We’d need to “expect” that according to our epistemically idealized self, A has better expected total consequences across the cosmos (normative premise). But if our understanding of these actions’ consequences is too coarse, then we can’t say how our idealized self would compare their expected values (conceptual premise). And our understanding of any given action's cosmos-wide consequences is in fact that coarse (empirical premise). [...]

---

Outline:

(00:42) Argument breakdown

(03:51) Why cluelessness matters

(07:12) Critiques: What I expect to be productive, and what's been said so far

(09:29) Acknowledgments

(09:37) Appendix: Sequence summary annotated with the corresponding premises

The original text contained 43 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR

• We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni's sequence, ‘The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance’—submit your entries by August 14th.
• There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: 7 thousand dollars in total.
  • Additionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to 50 thousand dollars for a truly exceptional entry: an original solution to cluelessness, or a critique decisive enough to move the debate.
• We’re also offering a referral prize of $250 if a winner says you’re responsible for telling them about the competition.

Motivation

When I announced April's Better Futures Highlight Week,[1] I confidently wrote: “To make the future go better, we can either work to avoid near-term catastrophes like human extinction or improve the futures where we survive.”

But what if I was wrong? What if both options are bankrupt, and we have no justified answer as to whether any particular work would make the future better? In his Challenge of Unawareness sequence, Anthony DiGiovanni argues that we are in just this position.

Specifically, he argues that our evidence about the future is so poor that our assessments of impact (explicit expected-value estimates [...]

---

Outline:

(00:12) TL;DR

(00:54) Motivation

(02:12) How the competition works

(02:55) What your entry should look like

(03:49) Option 1: Challenge a premise

(05:19) Option 2: Challenge the inference

(05:33) Option 3: Offer a constructive response

(05:54) Prizes

(05:58) Essay competition

(07:43) Comment competition

(08:09) How will the essays and comments be judged?

(08:40) What comes after the competition?

(09:00) Judges

(09:13) Essay competition

(09:33) Comment competition

(09:50) Disclaimer

(10:44) FAQs

(10:48) Can I use AI?

(11:21) Can I co-author a piece?

(11:31) Can I submit a piece I've already published elsewhere?

(12:03) Will I get feedback on my entry?

(12:31) Does style matter?

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.