I’m not sure to what extent the Situational Awareness Memo or Leopold himself are representatives of ‘EA’
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 world’s 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 isn’t just AI Safety (yet), so having short timelines/high importance on AI shouldn’t be sufficient to make someone an EA?[1]
EA shouldn’t 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. Gideon’s 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, I’m not sure I’ve seen Leopold identify as an EA at all recently.
This again comes down to the nebulousness of what ‘being an EA’ means.[3] I have no doubts at all that, given what Leopold thinks is the way to have the most impact he’ll be very effective at achieving that.
Further, on your point, I think there’s a reason to suspect that something like situational awareness went viral in a way that, say, Rethink Priorities Moral Weight project didn’t—the promise many people see in powerful AI is power itself, and that’s always going to be interesting for people to follow, so I’m not sure that situational awareness becoming influential makes it more likely that other ‘EA’ ideas will
I view OpenAI as tending implicitly/explicitly anti-EA, though I don’t think there was an explicit ‘purge’, I think the culture/vision of the company was changed such that card-carrying EAs didn’t want to work there any more
In my post, I suggested that one possible future is that we stay at the “forefront of weirdness.” 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. I’m not trying to make any strong claims about whether any individual person counts as “EA”.)
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, it’s not clear to me this means that “EAs” are at fault for everything he does.
Yeah again I just think this depends on one’s 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 ‘Third Wave’ of EA?
I guess from my PoV what I’m saying is that I’m not sure there’s much ‘connective tissue’ between Leopold and myself, so when people use phrases like “listen to us” or “How could we have done” I end up thinking “who the heck is we/us?”
I’m not sure to what extent the Situational Awareness Memo or Leopold himself are representatives of ‘EA’
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 world’s 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 isn’t just AI Safety (yet), so having short timelines/high importance on AI shouldn’t be sufficient to make someone an EA?[1]
EA shouldn’t 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. Gideon’s 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, I’m not sure I’ve seen Leopold identify as an EA at all recently.
This again comes down to the nebulousness of what ‘being an EA’ means.[3] I have no doubts at all that, given what Leopold thinks is the way to have the most impact he’ll be very effective at achieving that.
Further, on your point, I think there’s a reason to suspect that something like situational awareness went viral in a way that, say, Rethink Priorities Moral Weight project didn’t—the promise many people see in powerful AI is power itself, and that’s always going to be interesting for people to follow, so I’m not sure that situational awareness becoming influential makes it more likely that other ‘EA’ ideas will
Plenty of e/accs have these two beliefs as well, they just expect alignment by default, for instance
I view OpenAI as tending implicitly/explicitly anti-EA, though I don’t think there was an explicit ‘purge’, I think the culture/vision of the company was changed such that card-carrying EAs didn’t 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
In my post, I suggested that one possible future is that we stay at the “forefront of weirdness.” 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. I’m not trying to make any strong claims about whether any individual person counts as “EA”.)
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, it’s not clear to me this means that “EAs” are at fault for everything he does.
Yeah again I just think this depends on one’s 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 ‘Third Wave’ of EA?
I guess from my PoV what I’m saying is that I’m not sure there’s much ‘connective tissue’ between Leopold and myself, so when people use phrases like “listen to us” or “How could we have done” I end up thinking “who the heck is we/us?”