Iām not sure to what extent the Situational Awareness Memo or Leopold himself are representatives of āEAā
In the pro-side:
Leopold thinks AGI is coming soon, will be a big deal, and that solving the alignment problem is one of the worldās most important priorities
He used to work at GPI & FTX, and formerly identified with EA
He (probably almost certainly) personally knows lots of EA people in the Bay
On the con-side:
EA isnāt just AI Safety (yet), so having short timelines/āhigh importance on AI shouldnāt be sufficient to make someone an EA?[1]
EA shouldnāt also just refer to a specific subset of the Bay Culture (please), or at least we need some more labels to distinguish different parts of it in that case
Many EAs have disagreed with various parts of the memo, e.g. Gideonās well received post here
Since his EA institutional history he moved to OpenAI (mixed)[2] and now runs an AGI investment firm.
By self-identification, Iām not sure Iāve seen Leopold identify as an EA at all recently.
This again comes down to the nebulousness of what ābeing an EAā means.[3] I have no doubts at all that, given what Leopold thinks is the way to have the most impact heāll be very effective at achieving that.
Further, on your point, I think thereās a reason to suspect that something like situational awareness went viral in a way that, say, Rethink Priorities Moral Weight project didnātāthe promise many people see in powerful AI is power itself, and thatās always going to be interesting for people to follow, so Iām not sure that situational awareness becoming influential makes it more likely that other āEAā ideas will
I view OpenAI as tending implicitly/āexplicitly anti-EA, though I donāt think there was an explicit āpurgeā, I think the culture/āvision of the company was changed such that card-carrying EAs didnāt want to work there any more
I think he is pretty clearly an EA given he used to help run the Future Fund, or at most an only very recently ex-EA. Having said that, itās not clear to me this means that āEAsā are at fault for everything he does.
Yeah again I just think this depends on oneās definition of EA, which is the point I was trying to make above.
Many people have turned away from EA, both the beliefs, institutions, and community in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. Even Ben Todd seems to not be an EA by some definitions any more, be that via association or identification. Who is to say Leopold is any different, or has not gone further? What then is the use of calling him EA, or using his views to represent the āThird Waveā of EA?
I guess from my PoV what Iām saying is that Iām not sure thereās much āconnective tissueā between Leopold and myself, so when people use phrases like ālisten to usā or āHow could we have doneā I end up thinking āwho the heck is we/āus?ā
In my post, I suggested that one possible future is that we stay at the āforefront of weirdness.ā Calculating moral weights, to use your example.
I could imagine though that the fact that our opinions might be read by someone with access to the nuclear codes changes how we do things.
I wish there was more debate about which of these futures is more desirable.
(This is what I was trying to get out with my original post. Iām not trying to make any strong claims about whether any individual person counts as āEAā.)
Iām not sure to what extent the Situational Awareness Memo or Leopold himself are representatives of āEAā
In the pro-side:
Leopold thinks AGI is coming soon, will be a big deal, and that solving the alignment problem is one of the worldās most important priorities
He used to work at GPI & FTX, and formerly identified with EA
He (
probablyalmost certainly) personally knows lots of EA people in the BayOn the con-side:
EA isnāt just AI Safety (yet), so having short timelines/āhigh importance on AI shouldnāt be sufficient to make someone an EA?[1]
EA shouldnāt also just refer to a specific subset of the Bay Culture (please), or at least we need some more labels to distinguish different parts of it in that case
Many EAs have disagreed with various parts of the memo, e.g. Gideonās well received post here
Since his EA institutional history he moved to OpenAI (mixed)[2] and now runs an AGI investment firm.
By self-identification, Iām not sure Iāve seen Leopold identify as an EA at all recently.
This again comes down to the nebulousness of what ābeing an EAā means.[3] I have no doubts at all that, given what Leopold thinks is the way to have the most impact heāll be very effective at achieving that.
Further, on your point, I think thereās a reason to suspect that something like situational awareness went viral in a way that, say, Rethink Priorities Moral Weight project didnātāthe promise many people see in powerful AI is power itself, and thatās always going to be interesting for people to follow, so Iām not sure that situational awareness becoming influential makes it more likely that other āEAā ideas will
Plenty of e/āaccs have these two beliefs as well, they just expect alignment by default, for instance
I view OpenAI as tending implicitly/āexplicitly anti-EA, though I donāt think there was an explicit āpurgeā, I think the culture/āvision of the company was changed such that card-carrying EAs didnāt want to work there any more
The 3 big defintions I have (self-identification, beliefs, actions) could all easily point in different directions for Leopold
I think he is pretty clearly an EA given he used to help run the Future Fund, or at most an only very recently ex-EA. Having said that, itās not clear to me this means that āEAsā are at fault for everything he does.
Yeah again I just think this depends on oneās definition of EA, which is the point I was trying to make above.
Many people have turned away from EA, both the beliefs, institutions, and community in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. Even Ben Todd seems to not be an EA by some definitions any more, be that via association or identification. Who is to say Leopold is any different, or has not gone further? What then is the use of calling him EA, or using his views to represent the āThird Waveā of EA?
I guess from my PoV what Iām saying is that Iām not sure thereās much āconnective tissueā between Leopold and myself, so when people use phrases like ālisten to usā or āHow could we have doneā I end up thinking āwho the heck is we/āus?ā
In my post, I suggested that one possible future is that we stay at the āforefront of weirdness.ā Calculating moral weights, to use your example.
I could imagine though that the fact that our opinions might be read by someone with access to the nuclear codes changes how we do things.
I wish there was more debate about which of these futures is more desirable.
(This is what I was trying to get out with my original post. Iām not trying to make any strong claims about whether any individual person counts as āEAā.)