Just as~2 years ago, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has significant room for more funding. This could be a pretty important point that informs end of year giving for a number of donors who are looking to make donations within the animal sector.

Briefly, here's why the Animal Welfare Fund has some pretty significant room for more funding at this point:

• Right now, there's currently ~$1M in the Animal Welfare Fund. 
• We also now have 50 grants, summing to ~$4.5M in grants under evaluation.
• Between mid-last year and mid-this year, the EA AWF received ~350 applications over the past year of which ~150 were desk rejects and ~200 were graded by fund managers. Of these ~200, ~60 received funding, and ~30 received the grant amount they applied for or more. 
• Assuming that the general shape of the pipeline remains similar, that could imply we may now have [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Just as~2 years ago, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has significant room for more funding. This could be a pretty important point that informs end of year giving for a number of donors who are looking to make donations within the animal sector.

Briefly, here's why the Animal Welfare Fund has some pretty significant room for more funding at this point:

• Right now, there's currently ~$1M in the Animal Welfare Fund. 
• We also now have 50 grants, summing to ~$4.5M in grants under evaluation.
• Between mid-last year and mid-this year, the EA AWF received ~350 applications over the past year of which ~150 were desk rejects and ~200 were graded by fund managers. Of these ~200, ~60 received funding, and ~30 received the grant amount they applied for or more. 
• Assuming that the general shape of the pipeline remains similar, that could imply we may now have more grants than we can fund. Potentially [...]

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Thanks to Michael St. Jules for his comments.

Key Takeaways

• The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong.
• Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking.
• If OP disagrees, they should practice reasoning transparency by clarifying their views:
  • How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods?
  • Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?
  • How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism?

Summary.

• Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives.
• Avoiding this conclusion seems very difficult:
  • Rejecting hedonism (the view that only pleasure and pain have moral [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) Key Takeaways

(02:46) The Evidence Endorses Prioritizing Animal Welfare in Neartermism

(06:32) Objections

(06:35) Animal Welfare Does Not Dominate in Neartermism

(07:07) RPs Project Assumptions are Incorrect

(09:21) Endorsing Overwhelming Non-Hedonism

(14:13) Endorsing Overwhelming Hierarchicalism

(16:09) Its Strongly Intuitive that Helping Humans Helping Chickens

(16:46) Skepticism of Formal Philosophy

(17:58) Even if Animal Welfare Dominates, it Still Shouldnt Receive a Majority of Neartermist Funding

(18:12) Worldview Diversification Opposes Majority Allocations to Controversial Cause Areas

(19:43) OP is Already a Massive Animal Welfare Funder

(20:16) Animal Welfare has Faster Diminishing Marginal Returns than Global Health

(21:36) Increasing Animal Welfare Funding would Reduce OP's Influence on Philanthropists

(23:42) Request for Reasoning Transparency from OP

(26:13) Conclusion

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The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc, the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.

A member of OpenAI's leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI's evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company's values, operations, and business, and already leads the company's research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.

Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the [...]

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Linkpost URL:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

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Summary 

We (Habiba Banu and Roxanne Heston) have launched Spiro, a new TB screening and prevention charity focused on children. Our website is here.

We are fundraising $198,000 for our first year. We’re currently reaching out to people in the EA network. So far we have between 20%-50% of our budget promised and fundraising is currently one of the main things we’re focusing on.

The major components of our first year budget are co-founder time, country visits, and delivery of a pilot program, which aims to do household-level TB screening and provision of preventative medication.

We think that this project has a lot of promise:

• Tuberculosis has a huge global burden, killing 1.3 million people every year, and is disproportionately neglected and fatal in young children.
• The evidence for preventative treatment is robust and household programs are promising, yet few high-burden countries have scaled up this intervention.
• Modeling by Charity Entrepreneurship and by academics indicate that this [...]

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Outline:

(02:10) Who are we?

(03:26) What are we going to do?

(04:12) Why TB?

(04:40) Why this intervention?

(06:36) Why Spiro?

(07:28) Budget

(09:21) Learn more

(09:36) Donations

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(Cross-posted from my website)

I’ve written a report about whether advanced AIs will fake alignment during training in order to get power later – a behavior I call “scheming” (also sometimes called “deceptive alignment”). The report is available on arXiv here. There's also an audio version here, and I’ve included the introductory section below. This section includes a full summary of the report, which covers most of the main points and technical terminology. I’m hoping that the summary will provide much of the context necessary to understand individual sections of the report on their own.

Abstract

This report examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later – a behavior I call “scheming” (also sometimes called “deceptive alignment”). I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly plausible outcome of using baseline machine learning methods to train goal-directed AIs sophisticated enough to [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) 0. Introduction

(11:44) 0.1 Preliminaries

(15:20) 0.2 Summary of the report

(15:49) 0.2.1 Summary of section 1

(17:55) 0.2.2 Summary of section 2

(34:10) 0.2.3 Summary of section 3

(38:10) 0.2.4 Summary of section 4

(50:17) 0.2.5 Summary of section 5

(53:50) 0.2.6 Summary of section 6

The original text contained 66 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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This post summarizes how my partner and I decided whether to have children or not. We spent hundreds of hours on this decision and hope to save others part of that time. We found it very useful to read the thoughts of people who share significant parts of our values on the topic and thus want to "pay it forward" by writing this up. In the end, we decided to have children; our son is four months old now and we’re very happy with how we made the decision and with how our lives are now (through a combination of sheer luck and good planning). It was a very narrow and very tough decision though.

Both of us care a lot about having a positive impact on the world and our jobs are the main way we expect to have an impact (through direct work and/or earning to give). As a [...]

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Outline:

(01:35) Process - how we decided

(04:25) Content - considerations we used

(04:29) Impact considerations

(04:33) Time

(07:29) Sleep

(10:45) Money

(11:33) Flexibility

(12:07) Effects on one's community

(13:07) Falling out of the heavy tail

(13:38) The childrens impact

(14:17) Value drift

(14:44) Personal life worthiness or happiness considerations

(14:49) Health

(18:06) Social/soft factors

(20:49) Overarching considerations

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Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3MzDMBk4DZrbYePJS/kids-or-no-kids

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Written in a personal capacity, and not representing either my current employer or former one)

In 2016, I founded Utility Farm, and later merged it with Wild-Animal Suffering Research (founded by Persis Eskander) to form Wild Animal Initiative. Wild Animal Initiative is, by my estimation, a highly successful research organization. The current Wild Animal Initiative staff deserve all the credit for where they have taken the organization, but I’m incredibly proud that I got to be involved early in the establishment of a new field of study, wild animal welfare science, and to see the tiny organization I started in an apartment with a few hundred dollars go on to be recommended by ACE as a Top Charity for 4 years in a row. In my opinion, Wild Animal Initiative has become, under the stewardship of more capable people than I, the single best bet for unlocking interventions that could tackle [...]

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Outline:

(08:21) A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for charities

(11:22) A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for the EA community

(13:59) The success of EA shouldn’t only be measured by how much money is moved by the community

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I spoke with some people who worked or served on the board at organizations that had a leadership transition after things went seriously wrong. In some cases the organizations were EA-affiliated, in other cases only tangentially related to the EA space.

This is an informal collection of advice the ~eight people I spoke with have for staff or board members who might find themselves in a similar position. I bucketed this advice into a few categories below. Some are direct quotes and others are paraphrases of what they said. All spelling is Americanized for anonymity.

I’m sharing it here not because I think it's an exhaustive accounting of all types of potential leadership issues (it's not) or because I think any of this is unique to or particularly prevalent in or around EA (I don’t). But I hope that it's helpful to any readers who may someday be [...]

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Outline:

(01:09) Written policies

(02:44) Role of board / advice for board

(06:25) Advice for staff

(11:02) More notes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I spoke with some people who worked or served on the board at organizations that had a leadership transition after things went seriously wrong. In some cases the organizations were EA-affiliated, in other cases only tangentially related to the EA space.

This is an informal collection of advice the ~eight people I spoke with have for staff or board members who might find themselves in a similar position. I bucketed this advice into a few categories below. Some are direct quotes and others are paraphrases of what they said. All spelling is Americanized for anonymity.

I’m sharing it here not because I think it's an exhaustive accounting of all types of potential leadership issues (it's not) or because I think any of this is unique to or particularly prevalent in or around EA (I don’t). But I hope that it's helpful to any readers who may someday be in a position like [...]

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Outline:

(01:06) Written policies

(02:39) Role of board / advice for board

(06:12) Advice for staff

(10:39) More notes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.