EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

We’re excited to announce a new volunteer-run organisation, UK Voters For Animals, dedicated to mobilising UK voters to win key legislative changes for farmed animals. Our goal is to recruit and train voters to meet with MPs and prospective MPs to build political support for our key asks. Due to the upcoming general election, we think this is a crucial time to apply pressure on politicians. If you want to use your political power to win change for farmed animals, sign up to get involved here. Please share with anyone who may be interested – we’re looking to find people in all 650 constituencies around the UK so no small feat! We think people in the EA community would be a great fit for helping out with this work because they are often thoughtful, pragmatic, and impact-focused. The minimum commitment required is attending a training, and participating in [...] --- First published: May 14th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BmWuycesbhnXhmy5D/announcing-uk-voters-for-animals --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a quickly-written opinion piece, of what I understand about OpenAI. I first posted it to Facebook, where it had some discussion. Some arguments that OpenAI is making, simultaneously: OpenAI will likely reach and own transformative AI (useful for attracting talent to work there). OpenAI cares a lot about safety (good for public PR and government regulations). OpenAI isn’t making anything dangerous and is unlikely to do so in the future (good for public PR and government regulations). OpenAI doesn’t need to spend many resources on safety, and implementing safe AI won’t put it at any competitive disadvantage (important for investors who own most of the company). Transformative AI will be incredibly valuable for all of humanity in the long term (for public PR and developers). People at OpenAI have thought long and hard about what will happen, and it will be fine. We can’t [...] --- First published: May 21st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9iLgAbu9KtpLupitk/what-s-going-on-with-openai-s-messaging --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Latest Draft Here Abstract. Here, I present GDP (per capita) forecasts of major economies until 2050. Since GDP per capita is the best generalized predictor of many important variables, such as welfare, GDP forecasts can give us a more concrete picture of what the world might look like in just 27 years. The key claim here is: even if AI does not cause transformative growth, our business-as-usual near-future is still surprisingly different from today. Results In recent history, we've seen unprecedented economic growth and rises in living standards.Consider this graph:[1] How will living standards improve as GDP per capita (GDP/cap) rises? Here, I show data that projects GDP/cap until 2050. Forecasting GDP per capita is a crucial undertaking as it strongly correlates with welfare indicators like consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. These forecasts make the future more concrete and give us a better sense [...] ---Outline:(00:39) Results(02:45) Discussion(05:40) Values and Culture(09:01) Growth could be much faster(11:49) Implications for AI(16:57) Will growth slow?(19:56) Methods(22:05) Persistence of growth(23:26) Future Research(29:05) Appendix: Further reading(29:09) The World in 2050(30:55) Economics(30:59) GDP as a proxy for welfare(31:03) AI(36:32) Forecasting(36:35) Fiction(36:38) Appendix: Causal Model Between Growth, Liberal Democracy, Human Capital, Peace, and X-Risk(36:59) Economic Growth causes…(37:47) Democracy causes...(40:02) Human capital causes…(40:44) Peace and stability causes...The original text contained 79 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ubZjxQocGqeZJJXE9/gdp-per-capita-in-2050 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I am a lawyer. I am not licensed in California, or Delaware, or any of the states that likely govern OpenAI's employment contracts. So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, as commentary rather than legal advice. But I am begging any California-licensed attorneys reading this to look into it in more detail. California may have idiosyncratic laws that completely destroy my analysis, which is based solely on general principles of contract law and not any research or analysis of state-specific statutes or cases. I also have not seen the actual contracts and am relying on media reports. But. I think the OpenAI anti-whistleblower agreement is completely unenforceable, with two caveats. Common law contract principles generally don't permit surprises, and don't allow new terms unless some mutual promise is made in return for those new terms. A valid contract requires a "meeting of [...] --- First published: May 18th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJAhePexStoEhAwto/call-for-attorneys-for-openai-employees-and-ex-employees --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The podcast pays tribute to Marisa, co-founder of EA Anywhere, who dedicated her life to alleviating suffering for others. It reflects on her impressive work ethic, sense of humor, and the importance of seeking help for mental health issues. The chapter highlights her impact on the effective altruism community and the need to prevent suicide contagion.

We are thrilled to introduce nine new charities launched through our February-March 2024 Incubation Program. This is an AIM record with an average of five charities launched per round in the previous years. We are also proud to announce that thanks to very generous donors from the Seed Network Funding Circle, these new organizations have secured over $1 million in funding! This is a significant milestone for AIM as an organization. We are very grateful for the support of our funders, mentors, and, most of all, the talented applicants who decided to pursue entrepreneurial careers in the nonprofit sector. We are committed to ongoing support for these new initiatives through mentorship, operational assistance, free co-working space in London, and access to an ever-expanding entrepreneurial network of funders, advisors, interns, and fellow charity founders. This article provides a brief introduction to our new organizations. You will find more information [...] ---Outline:(02:25) Centre for Aquaculture Progress(06:01) Notify Health(09:53) Learning Alliance(15:06) Novah(20:11) Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI)(23:59) FarmKind(28:40) Ark Philanthropy--- First published: May 14th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tDQm4Z5aQytRE2RKn/presenting-nine-new-charities-a-record-for-the-aim-ce --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We’re excited to share a new addition to our site: an impact-focused job board! We’ve considered launching a job board for some time, so we’re happy to add this feature to the Probably Good site. The job board aims to: Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers. Direct our audience to concrete opportunities that meet a high standard of impact. Reduce friction for people on our site to take the first step towards a career change, by providing opportunities to apply for or just exposing them to new options. As Animal Advocacy Careers have highlighted before, job boards are often the primary gateway to career advice sites, and so we hope the job board will also extend our content's reach and general impact. Why we’re launching a job [...] ---Outline:(00:59) Why we’re launching a job board(02:34) How you can help(03:09) Final Notes--- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPB87ayzzwAoxycvN/probably-good-launched-a-new-job-board --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

GPT-5 training is probably starting around now. It seems very unlikely that GPT-5 will cause the end of the world. But it's hard to be sure. I would guess that GPT-5 is more likely to kill me than an asteroid, a supervolcano, a plane crash or a brain tumor. We can predict fairly well what the cross-entropy loss will be, but pretty much nothing else. Maybe we will suddenly discover that the difference between GPT-4 and superhuman level is actually quite small. Maybe GPT-5 will be extremely good at interpretability, such that it can recursively self improve by rewriting its own weights. Hopefully model evaluations can catch catastrophic risks before wide deployment, but again, it's hard to be sure. GPT-5 could plausibly be devious enough so circumvent all of our black-box testing. Or it may be that it's too late as soon as the model has been trained. These [...] ---Outline:(01:10) How do we do better for GPT-6?(02:02) Plan B: Mass protests against AI(03:06) No innovation required(04:36) The discomfort of doing something weird(05:53) Preparing for the moment--- First published: April 30th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J8sw7o5mWbGFaBW4o/why-i-m-doing-pauseai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they’ve changed. The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can’t share names). Below is how I’d summarise the main themes in what was said. If you have different impressions of the landscape, I’d be keen to hear them. There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence. Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it's harder to identify [...] --- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YDjH6ACPZq889tqeJ/updates-on-the-ea-catastrophic-risk-landscape --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I am dealing with repetitive strain injury and don’t foresee being able to really respond to any comments. I’m a little hesitant to post this, but I thought I should be vulnerable. Honestly, I'm relieved that I finally get to share my voice. I know some people may want me to discuss this privately – but that might not be helpful to me, as I know some issues have been tried to be silenced by the very people who were meant to help. And to be honest, the fear of criticizing EA is something I have disliked about EA – I’ve been behind the scenes enough to know that despite being well-intentioned, criticizing EA (especially openly) can privately get you excluded from opportunities and circles, often even silently. This is an internal battle I’ve had with EA for a while (years). Still, I thought by sharing my experiences I [...] ---Outline:(00:55) Appreciation and disillusionment(03:30) Specific challenges(03:33) When it has been uncomfortable for diversity and inclusion(04:33) When it primarily became about prestige or funding(07:13) When professional social dynamics were unhealthy(09:46) When empathy is deprioritized and logic/consequentialism/utilitarianism becomes toxic(13:38) Parting ways--- First published: May 3rd, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3GjstAyhH9cDeNar4/my-lament-to-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.