Excellent list! On biodefence-relevant tech: One market screaming (actually, literally) for a solution is parents of small children. They get infected at a very high rate and I suspect this is via transmission routes in pre-schools that we would also be concerned about in a pandemic. While it is uncertain how a business addressing this market will actually shake out, I think it is generally in the direction of something likely to be biodefence-relevant. As a currently sick parent of small children myself, I would be very happy to start such a business after my current project comes to an end. And I think only ~40% reduction in sick days is enough to make this business viable and the current bar for hygiene is really low so I think it is feasible to achieve such reductions.
More generally, and in parallel to your proposed method of looking for markets that specific interventions could target, I would also consider looking for markets that roughly point in the direction of biodefence. The saying goes that it is more likely to have business success if focusing on a problem, rather than having a solution looking for a problem to solve. Another example from my personal history of markets roughly in the direction of biodefence is traveling abroad—many people have their long-planned and/or expensive holidays ruined due to stomach bugs, etc.
I think it’s probably true that teams inside of major labs are better placed to work on AI lab coordination broadly, and this post was published before news of the frontier models forum came out. Still, I think there is still room for coordination to promote AI safety outcomes between labs, e.g. something that brings together open-source actors. However, this project area is probably less tractable and neglected now than when we originally shared this idea.
Excellent list! On biodefence-relevant tech: One market screaming (actually, literally) for a solution is parents of small children. They get infected at a very high rate and I suspect this is via transmission routes in pre-schools that we would also be concerned about in a pandemic. While it is uncertain how a business addressing this market will actually shake out, I think it is generally in the direction of something likely to be biodefence-relevant. As a currently sick parent of small children myself, I would be very happy to start such a business after my current project comes to an end. And I think only ~40% reduction in sick days is enough to make this business viable and the current bar for hygiene is really low so I think it is feasible to achieve such reductions.
More generally, and in parallel to your proposed method of looking for markets that specific interventions could target, I would also consider looking for markets that roughly point in the direction of biodefence. The saying goes that it is more likely to have business success if focusing on a problem, rather than having a solution looking for a problem to solve. Another example from my personal history of markets roughly in the direction of biodefence is traveling abroad—many people have their long-planned and/or expensive holidays ruined due to stomach bugs, etc.
I think it’s probably true that teams inside of major labs are better placed to work on AI lab coordination broadly, and this post was published before news of the frontier models forum came out. Still, I think there is still room for coordination to promote AI safety outcomes between labs, e.g. something that brings together open-source actors. However, this project area is probably less tractable and neglected now than when we originally shared this idea.