EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This is a link post.

cart;horse: Most startups fail, this one did too. Tried too much with too little, with a little too much ego.

Coordinal Research's goal was to build an automated safety research platform. A researcher writes “Replicate X result from paper Y with tweak Z” and the system provisions a sandboxed compute environment, gathers context, writes code, runs experiments, and returns a research report plus oversight trail.

The bet was that AI-accelerated research is coming whether we like it or not, and having this differentially happen for safety work faster is good. The bet didn’t pay off — at least not in the form I tried to make it.

The main content is the condensed version. The full chronology, the final push, and the technical artifacts I shipped are appendices for anyone who wants them. See also our Manifund page for the original pitch/ask.

The arc, in brief.

The startup. Fall 2024 to Fall 2025: out of MATS 6.0, through Catalyze, into cofounding with Jacques. Most of Q1–Q2 2025 was grant applications and demo building (no dice on grants). In April a funder I’d previously pitched came back via a coworking connection. After a carefully-crafted email, we [...]

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Outline:

(01:07) The arc, in brief.

(03:01) Lessons.

(07:16) What's Next.

(08:46) Appendix.

(08:51) A: The Startup.

(16:00) B: The Startdown.

(20:17) C: The Salvage.

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First published:

May 18th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uTffD74jJrQvHJuBY/coordinal-a-postmortem

Linkpost URL:
https://ronakrm.github.io/coordinal-postmortem/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hello Effective Altruists!

I write to let you know that Legal Impact for Chickens is suing California's largest poultry producer, Foster Farms, for animal cruelty. Foster Farms raises and slaughters approximately 290 million chickens per year.

LIC's complaint accuses Foster Farms of crushing chickens with forklifts, forcing birds to live among the maggot-covered corpses of their dead flock mates, and kicking and throwing animals.

The animal cruelty lawsuit comes on the heels of a damning undercover investigation that LIC funded fellow-nonprofit Animal Outlook to conduct. Learn more here: https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/foster-farms and read the complaint here: https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/foster-farms-complaint.

Animal cruelty is a crime in California, as in every state.

Thank you to the EA Community for making this litigation possible!

Love,

Alene

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First published:

May 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bekzfuhSsdiufooXs/california-s-largest-poultry-producer-sued-for-cruelty

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact's Slack workspace about GiveWell's decision to stop funding Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water program. The conversation surfaced themes that we felt were worth sharing more broadly. Everyone involved consented to their thoughts being shared in this way. An LLM was used to process and anonymize the transcript.

For context/credibility, several of the organizations involved were GiveWell grantees.

Core Takeaways

I drew out a few core themes from the conversation as takeaways up at the top. The full anonymized discussion is reproduced below. Names have been redacted, and some messages have been rephrased to remove identifying details.

1. Independent verification steps have to be happening. M+E, at minimum, should be validating core program inputs and outputs at the start and end of a theory of change (e.g., in a basic healthcare program, you’d like to know whether the child was actually sick at the start of treatment, and whether they were actually healthy at the end of treatment). It was surprising this seemed to come late to Dispensers for Safe Water.

2. GiveWell probably underestimates implementation difficulty across [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) Core Takeaways

(02:45) The Discussion

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First published:

May 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ru3wySwYkuwmwuaDW/global-health-charity-founders-on-givewell-evidence-action

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In Development is "a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress happens — or doesn’t happen — in the developing world".

This week (May 11-17), the EA Forum is collaborating with the magazine to bring you their first batch of articles[1], along with their authors[2], ready to answer your questions. Lauren Gilbert, the magazine's editor-in-chief, will also be present in this thread to answer questions about the magazine itself.

You can ask questions here in the thread, or on the individual posts.

Read all the articles

Thanks to In Development for working with us to make this happen! You can subscribe to their Substack on the link below:

Subscribe to In Development

Participants in this thread:

@Lauren Gilbert is the Editor in Chief of In Development, as well as a non-resident fellow at the Centre for British Progress, the Energy for Growth Hub, and the Roots of Progress Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Works in Progress, and Asterisk. She has previously been a program manager at Renaissance Philanthropy, a research fellow at Open Philanthropy, as well as a theoretical neutrino astrophysicist.

@Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center [...]

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First published:

May 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gjxjuJDeoWBs4oPcH/in-development-discussion-thread

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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TLDR

• NGOs pay less than for-profits.
• Employees accept this because they have impact.
• This makes employees implicit donors to the NGOs
• NGOs should account for this in cost-effectiveness calculations
• This is a coordination problem and can only be solved as a movement
• Salary sacrifice is more tax-efficient than donating the money
• This would make finding talent for pressing problems much easier
• It is a problem EA is uniquely positioned to solve

In this post, I use "salary sacrifice" informally to mean voluntarily accepting compensation below one's market alternative. I do not mean the formal payroll or tax arrangement called “salary sacrifice” in some jurisdictions.

Measuring impact

How do you measure your impact of working at an NGO? You could try analyzing your replaceability, but that's hard and pretty contested. Or you could just look at the "input" - donations vs the "output" - impact, and divide it up.

For example: Let's assume the Against Malaria Foundation managed to save one life. They did this with EUR 3000 donations raised. From those donations they paid salaries, bednets, research and evaluation.

The Against Malaria Foundation "sells" that impact to their donors. As a donor, you can "buy" one life saved [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) TLDR

(01:00) Measuring impact

(02:24) Implications for cost effectiveness analyses

(03:30) This is a coordination problem

(05:14) Salary sacrifices are tax efficient

(06:09) What does this mean for career choice?

(07:09) Whats there to lose?

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First published:

May 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/emzoKk4RS3aGEgyJF/salary-sacrifices-are-donations-let-s-treat-them-as-such

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

Our mission is to protect humanity against biological catastrophes, including those that could lead to human extinction or cause similarly bad outcomes. This series of posts outlines how I think about these most extreme types of risks. My goal here is to share my worldview in a straightforward and compressed form rather than trying to persuade a skeptical audience, although I do share some of my reasoning.

Part I describes my views on the sources of risk and what that implies for how to prioritize response to a biological catastrophe. Part II, describes sources of risk and what that implies for prevention efforts.

TLDR: We can solve the vast majority of existential biological risk by ubiquitously deploying simple and cheap countermeasures like PPE, air filters, UVC, etc. My takes are:

• >99% of existential risk is from engineered threats, <1% natural threats
• >95% of existential risk is targeting humans, <5% targeting agriculture or the environment
• The space of possible human-targeted attacks is basically infinite, so predicting cures or vaccines in advance is hopeless…
• …but the space of physical pathways into a human body is both finite and small, which means, if this is true…
• …we [...]

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Outline:

(02:13) Direct vs. indirect existential risk

(03:26) Natural vs. engineered

(04:36) Targeting human bodies vs. agriculture vs environment

(08:09) The space of human-targeted biological threats is vast and unpredictable

(10:15) Can we affordably block ~all human-targeted biological risk? (and thus ~all catastrophic bio risk?)

(13:47) A surprisingly hopeful conclusion

The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

May 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2j9xh7CmFjWktCWhR/how-i-think-about-catastrophic-biological-risk-part-i

Linkpost URL:
https://defensesindepth.bio/how-i-think-about-catastrophic-biological-risk-part-i/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crosspost.

I first watched the YouTube videos of Jack Hancock in high school, and they might be where I first heard the case for the moral significance of wild animal suffering. I met Jack at EAG London last year. He recently released a film called The Dying Trade: it is one of the best films I’ve watched, and I recommend you watch it.

Jack is a vegan activist. His father is a slaughterhouse worker. A big part of the film is spent reckoning with that fact, thinking about how we should treat those we are close to, when they work in an industry dedicated to systematic killing.

In college, Jack learned what happens to animals on factory farms. He went vegan and annoyed the people around him by telling them to do the same (so relatable!). He became an activist and started making YouTube videos. For the first time, he seriously grappled with the facts about what his father does—that his father works in the industry that Jack considers to be the cruelest on Earth, where his day job is to kill.

The film introduces us to a roving band of characters.

First, of course, are the animals. [...]

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First published:

May 15th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5EMt9awTxXc5pDrfq/review-the-dying-trade

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Summary

AI safety is constrained on talent in many ways, but the reasons behind the constraints vary between types of talent. This post is based on all posts and documents I could find from the past ~ 3 years related to hiring needs and talent pipelines, which I have listed in this document.

Technical research talent - we have strong talent pipelines delivering young researchers to the field, but we are constrained on more senior researchers who could mentor the juniors, e.g., as research managers. We might also need more talent to work on AI security.

Policy and governance talent - there is some infrastructure bringing talent to work on policy and governance, but it's not as robust as for technical research. The information about what is needed in this sub-field is quite scarce, but some data points to the need for talent that combines technical and policy skills, and for experienced political operators.

Generalist talent - finding candidates for operational and fieldbuilding roles is challenging across the field. In particular, talent with deep context of AI safety and senior operators are scarce. There are few talent development programs bringing skilled generalists to the field.

Grantmaking talent - just [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(02:28) Introduction

(16:28) Ops and fieldbuilding (generalist) constraint

(18:58) Now that weve clarified that: are we constrained on fieldbuilders and operators?

(23:39) Grantmakers

(29:25) Scaling

(29:51) Leadership

(32:57) Founding new organisations

(34:59) Scaling the existing organisations

(37:12) Limitations & caveats

(38:36) Some information that I think should be published, but its not

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First published:

May 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NrYkhgh6ZGrGtxxnc/talent-constraints-in-ai-safety-what-we-know-and-what-we-don

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I’m an EA who has been trying to find ways to make animal suffering more salient. I’ve been working on a feature-length documentary called ‘The Dying Trade’ for the last 5 years and I’ve just released it on YouTube.

I’m sharing it here for two reasons: firstly, because I hope it can become a useful resource that advocates share with others as an introduction to animal ethics; and secondly, because strong engagement in the early days will help YouTube recommend the film to more people, increasing its impact.

Trailer:

Full film:

About the film

Jack is a vegan activist. His father is a slaughterhouse worker. After years of avoiding the subject, Jack sets out to confront the unspoken tension between them. This intimate and contemplative documentary follows a son's attempt to understand his father - and the industry that stands between them.

I didn’t really want to make a documentary about my relationship with my father. At times, it was quite uncomfortable.

For the last 8 years or so, I’ve been trying to increase the salience of animal suffering, primarily through producing videos on my YouTube channel: Humane Hancock. And one thing has always been [...]

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First published:

May 13th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NkXb6hP38MReioe6Z/my-dad-worked-in-a-slaughterhouse-i-made-a-documentary-about

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Cross-posted from The Counterfactual by the Forum Team.

Subtitle: A concrete strategy for deploying the largest wave of philanthropic capital in history

The OpenAI Foundation holds 180 billion dollars in equity. Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. When the time comes to spend all this money, what should we actually do with it?

Here's my best guess.

The problem: scaling what we have is not enough

When most people think about how to solve AI safety, they think about what we’re already doing, and how to scale it up. Concretely, this looks like: scaling fellowships like MATS, Pivotal, and ERA; investing more money into AI safety research organizations like Redwood, METR, and MIRI; and perhaps, more recently, expanding programs like the Generator Residency.

This is important work, but it is not sufficient to win.

The Maven system that killed 120 children in Minab wasn’t misaligned. Claude didn’t go rogue. The system did exactly what it was designed to do.

The failure was that no government framework existed to regulate how AI gets integrated into military kill chains, how fast targeting decisions can be compressed, or what human oversight is required before a strike.

Alignment research [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) The problem: scaling what we have is not enough

(02:54) 1. Billions into mass media and movement building

(07:56) 2. Billions into political infrastructure

(10:00) 3. Build the capacity to deploy the rest

(10:19) a. Solve the grantmaker bottleneck

(11:56) b. Recruit top technical talent

(12:49) c. Address the generalist bottleneck

(13:29) d. Fix fellowship pipelines

(14:04) Conclusion

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First published:

May 13th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/npgwfZ6GpypGPKgyZ/how-to-actually-spend-billions-on-ai-safety

Linkpost URL:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-197142434

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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