Is there a reason itâs impossible to find out who is involved with this project?
Maybe itâs on purpose, but through the website I couldnât find out whoâs on the team, who supports it, or what kind of organisation (nonprofit? For profit? Etc.) you are legally.
If this was a deliberate and strategic choice against being transparent because of the nature of the work you expect to be doing, Iâd love to hear why you made it!
[My 2 cents: As an org that is focused on advocacy and campaigns, it might be especially important to be transparent to build trust. Itâs projects like yours where I find myself MOST interested who is behind it to evaluate trustworthiness, conflicting incentives, etc. For all I know (from the website), you could be a competitor of the company you are targeting! I am not saying you need Fish-Welfare-Project-level transparency with open budgets etc.,and maybe I am just an overly suspicious website visitor, but I felt it was worth flagging]
Hey! Thanks for the commentâthis makes sense. Iâm the founder and executive director (thatâs why I made this post under my name!) and The Midas Project is a nonprofit, which by law entails that details about our funding will be made public in annual filings and such reports will be available upon request, and that our work has to exclusively serve the public interest and not privately benefit anyone associated with the organization (which is generally determined by the IRS and/âor independent audits). Hope this assuages some concerns.
Itâs true we donât have a âteamâ page or anything like that. FWIW, this is clearly the norm for campaigning/âadvocacy nonprofits (for example, take a look at the websites for the animal groups I mentioned, or Greenpeace/âSunrise Movement in the climate space) and that precedent is a big part of why I chose the relative level of privacy here â though Iâm open to arguments that we should do it differently. I think the most important consideration is protecting the privacy of individual contributors since this work has the potential to make some powerful enemies⊠or just to draw the ire of e/âaccs on Twitter. Maybe both! I would be more open to adding an âour leadershipâ page, which is more common for such orgsâbut weâre still building out a leadership team so it seems a bit premature. And, like with funding, leadership details will all be in public filings anyway.
Those orgs you list are big legacy orgs. I would imagine (although I havenât checked) that most new orgs would have their team listed. If bad actors put in 1 minute of Internet effort they will find you anywayâso then for credibility reasons why not have a team page with your names and backgrounds?
Additionally if you want to show that you can credibly engage policymakers (which I think you might need to do in order to put pressure on these companies) I would expect transparency of people and funding sources to help a lot.
IMO it makes much more sense to target AI developers who are training foundation models with huge amounts of compute. My understanding is that Cognition isnât training foundation models, and is more of a âwrapperâ in the sense that they are building on top of othersâ foundation models to apply scaffolding, and/âor fine-tuning with <~1% of the foundation model training compute. Correct me if Iâm wrong.
Gesturing at some of the reasons I think that wrappers should be deprioritized:
Over time, Iâd guess that wrapper companies working on AI R&D-relevant tasks like Cognition either get acquired or fade into irrelevancy since there will be pressure to make AI R&D agents internally (maybe this campaign is still useful if it gets acquired though?)
Good question! I basically agree with you about the relative importance of foundation model developers here (although I havenât thought too much about the third point you mentioned. Thanks for bringing it up.)
I should say we are doing some other work to raise awareness about foundation model risksâespecially at OpenAI, given recent eventsâbut not at the level of this campaign.
The main constraint was starting (relatively) small. Weâd really like to win these campaigns, and we donât plan to let up until we have. The foundation model developers are generally some of the biggest companies in the world (hence the huge compute, as you mention), and the resources needed to win a campaign likely scale in proportion to the size of the target. We decided itâd be good to keep building our supporter base and reputation before taking the bigger players on. Cognition in particular seems to be in the center of the triple venn diagram between âmaking high-risk systems,â âway behind the curve on safety issues,â and âsmall enough that they canât afford to ignore this.â
Btw, my background is in animal advocacy, and this is somewhat similar to how groups scaled there. i.e. they started by getting local restaurants to stop serving fois gras, and scaled up to getting McDonalds to phase out eggs from battery cages nationwide. Obviously we have less time with this issueâso I would like to scale quickly.
What are the key leverage points to get these companies to listen to campaigners such as yourself? How does this differ from the animal right space and how will this affect your strategy? What do you have in terms of strategy documents or theory of change?
Some thoughts on my mind are:
To the best of my understanding the animal rights corporate campaigning space is unable to exert much or any influence on B2B (business to business) companies. Animal campaigns only appear to have influenced B2C (business to consumer) companies. An autonomous coding agent feels more B2B and by analogy having any influence here could be extremely difficult. That said I donât think this should be a huge problem as...
The leverage points for influencing companies in the AI space is very different to the animal space. In particular AI companies are probably much more concerned about losing employees to other companies than food companies. I expect they are also likely concerned about regulation that could restrict their actions. I expect there much less concerned about public image. As such..
This does suggest to somewhat different approach to corporate campaign. Potentially targeting employees more (although probably not picking on individuals) and greater focus on presenting the targeted company negatively to regulators/âpolicymakers or to investors, more than to the public.
This is just quick thoughts and I might be wrong about much of this. I just wanted to flag as your post seemed to suggest that this work would be similar to work in the animal space and in many ways it is but I think thereâs a risk of not seeing the differences. I wish you all the best of luck with your campaigning.
Thanks for the comment! I agree with a lot of your thinking here and that there will be many asymmetries.
One random thing that might surprise you: in fact, the sector that animal groups have had the most success with is a B2B one: foodservice providers. For B2B companies, individual customers are fewer in number and much more important in magnitude â so the prospect of convincing, for example, an entire hospital or university to switch their multi-million dollar contract to a competitor with a higher standard for animal welfare is especially threatening. I think the same phenomenon might carry over to the tech industry. However, even in the foodservice provider case, public perception is still one of the main driving factors (i.e., universities and hospitals care about the animal welfare practices of their suppliers in part because they know their students/âclients care).
Your advice about outreach to employees and other stakeholders is well-taken too :) Thanks!
To be clear I would consider the target of the campaign in those cases to be on the hospital or the university and those to be B2C organizations in some meaningful way.
Huh, interesting! I guess you could define it this way, but I worry that muddies the definition of âcampaign target.â In common usage, I think the definition is approximately: what is the institution you are raising awareness about and asking to adopt a specific change? A simple test to determine the campaign target might be âWhat institution is being named in the campaign materials?â or âWhat institution has the power to end the campaign by adopting the demands of the campaigners?â
In the case of animal welfare campaigns against foodservice providers, it seems like thatâs clearly the foodservice companies themselves. Then, in the process of that campaign, one thing youâll do is raise awareness about the issue among that companyâs customers (e.g. THLâs âfoodservice provider guideâ which raised awareness among public institutions), which isnât all that different from raising awareness among the public in a campaign targeting a B2C company.
I suppose this is just a semantic disagreement, but in practice, it suggests to me that B2B businesses are still vulnerable, in part because they arenât insulated from public opinionâtheyâre just one degree removed from it.
EDIT: Another, much stronger piece of evidence in favor of influence on B2B: Chicken Watch reports 586 commitments secured from food manufacturers and 60 from distributors. Some of those companies are functionally B2C (e.g. manufacturing consumer packaged goods sold under their own brand) but some are clearly B2B (e.g. Perdue Farmsâ BCC commitment).
Similar campaigns have worked really well for animal advocacy, so Iâm excited to see what you can accomplish.
Iâm wondering, what kinds of tasks can volunteers help with? If I have no social media accounts or experience trying to promote causes on social media is there anything I can do?
Youâre right that the main tasks are digital advocacyâbut even if youâre not on social media, there are some direct outreach tasks that involve emailing and calling specific stakeholders. We have one task like that live on our action hub now, and will be adding more soon.
Outside of that, we could use all sorts of general volunteer supportâanything from campaign recruitment to writing content. Also always eager to hear advice on strategy. Would love to chat more if youâre interested.
Is there a reason itâs impossible to find out who is involved with this project? Maybe itâs on purpose, but through the website I couldnât find out whoâs on the team, who supports it, or what kind of organisation (nonprofit? For profit? Etc.) you are legally. If this was a deliberate and strategic choice against being transparent because of the nature of the work you expect to be doing, Iâd love to hear why you made it!
[My 2 cents: As an org that is focused on advocacy and campaigns, it might be especially important to be transparent to build trust. Itâs projects like yours where I find myself MOST interested who is behind it to evaluate trustworthiness, conflicting incentives, etc. For all I know (from the website), you could be a competitor of the company you are targeting! I am not saying you need Fish-Welfare-Project-level transparency with open budgets etc.,and maybe I am just an overly suspicious website visitor, but I felt it was worth flagging]
Hey! Thanks for the commentâthis makes sense. Iâm the founder and executive director (thatâs why I made this post under my name!) and The Midas Project is a nonprofit, which by law entails that details about our funding will be made public in annual filings and such reports will be available upon request, and that our work has to exclusively serve the public interest and not privately benefit anyone associated with the organization (which is generally determined by the IRS and/âor independent audits). Hope this assuages some concerns.
Itâs true we donât have a âteamâ page or anything like that. FWIW, this is clearly the norm for campaigning/âadvocacy nonprofits (for example, take a look at the websites for the animal groups I mentioned, or Greenpeace/âSunrise Movement in the climate space) and that precedent is a big part of why I chose the relative level of privacy here â though Iâm open to arguments that we should do it differently. I think the most important consideration is protecting the privacy of individual contributors since this work has the potential to make some powerful enemies⊠or just to draw the ire of e/âaccs on Twitter. Maybe both! I would be more open to adding an âour leadershipâ page, which is more common for such orgsâbut weâre still building out a leadership team so it seems a bit premature. And, like with funding, leadership details will all be in public filings anyway.
Thanks again for the feedback! Itâs useful.
Those orgs you list are big legacy orgs. I would imagine (although I havenât checked) that most new orgs would have their team listed. If bad actors put in 1 minute of Internet effort they will find you anywayâso then for credibility reasons why not have a team page with your names and backgrounds?
Additionally if you want to show that you can credibly engage policymakers (which I think you might need to do in order to put pressure on these companies) I would expect transparency of people and funding sources to help a lot.
How did you decide to target Cognition?
IMO it makes much more sense to target AI developers who are training foundation models with huge amounts of compute. My understanding is that Cognition isnât training foundation models, and is more of a âwrapperâ in the sense that they are building on top of othersâ foundation models to apply scaffolding, and/âor fine-tuning with <~1% of the foundation model training compute. Correct me if Iâm wrong.
Gesturing at some of the reasons I think that wrappers should be deprioritized:
Much of the risks from scheming AIs routes through internal AI R&D via internal foundation models
Over time, Iâd guess that wrapper companies working on AI R&D-relevant tasks like Cognition either get acquired or fade into irrelevancy since there will be pressure to make AI R&D agents internally (maybe this campaign is still useful if it gets acquired though?)
Accelerating LM agent scaffolding has unclear sign for safety
Maybe the answer is that Cognition was way better than foundation model developers on other dimensions, in which case, fair enough.
Good question! I basically agree with you about the relative importance of foundation model developers here (although I havenât thought too much about the third point you mentioned. Thanks for bringing it up.)
I should say we are doing some other work to raise awareness about foundation model risksâespecially at OpenAI, given recent eventsâbut not at the level of this campaign.
The main constraint was starting (relatively) small. Weâd really like to win these campaigns, and we donât plan to let up until we have. The foundation model developers are generally some of the biggest companies in the world (hence the huge compute, as you mention), and the resources needed to win a campaign likely scale in proportion to the size of the target. We decided itâd be good to keep building our supporter base and reputation before taking the bigger players on. Cognition in particular seems to be in the center of the triple venn diagram between âmaking high-risk systems,â âway behind the curve on safety issues,â and âsmall enough that they canât afford to ignore this.â
Btw, my background is in animal advocacy, and this is somewhat similar to how groups scaled there. i.e. they started by getting local restaurants to stop serving fois gras, and scaled up to getting McDonalds to phase out eggs from battery cages nationwide. Obviously we have less time with this issueâso I would like to scale quickly.
What are the key leverage points to get these companies to listen to campaigners such as yourself? How does this differ from the animal right space and how will this affect your strategy? What do you have in terms of strategy documents or theory of change?
Some thoughts on my mind are:
To the best of my understanding the animal rights corporate campaigning space is unable to exert much or any influence on B2B (business to business) companies. Animal campaigns only appear to have influenced B2C (business to consumer) companies. An autonomous coding agent feels more B2B and by analogy having any influence here could be extremely difficult. That said I donât think this should be a huge problem as...
The leverage points for influencing companies in the AI space is very different to the animal space. In particular AI companies are probably much more concerned about losing employees to other companies than food companies. I expect they are also likely concerned about regulation that could restrict their actions. I expect there much less concerned about public image. As such..
This does suggest to somewhat different approach to corporate campaign. Potentially targeting employees more (although probably not picking on individuals) and greater focus on presenting the targeted company negatively to regulators/âpolicymakers or to investors, more than to the public.
This is just quick thoughts and I might be wrong about much of this. I just wanted to flag as your post seemed to suggest that this work would be similar to work in the animal space and in many ways it is but I think thereâs a risk of not seeing the differences. I wish you all the best of luck with your campaigning.
Thanks for the comment! I agree with a lot of your thinking here and that there will be many asymmetries.
One random thing that might surprise you: in fact, the sector that animal groups have had the most success with is a B2B one: foodservice providers. For B2B companies, individual customers are fewer in number and much more important in magnitude â so the prospect of convincing, for example, an entire hospital or university to switch their multi-million dollar contract to a competitor with a higher standard for animal welfare is especially threatening. I think the same phenomenon might carry over to the tech industry. However, even in the foodservice provider case, public perception is still one of the main driving factors (i.e., universities and hospitals care about the animal welfare practices of their suppliers in part because they know their students/âclients care).
Your advice about outreach to employees and other stakeholders is well-taken too :) Thanks!
Thank you for considering my comments
To be clear I would consider the target of the campaign in those cases to be on the hospital or the university and those to be B2C organizations in some meaningful way.
Huh, interesting! I guess you could define it this way, but I worry that muddies the definition of âcampaign target.â In common usage, I think the definition is approximately: what is the institution you are raising awareness about and asking to adopt a specific change? A simple test to determine the campaign target might be âWhat institution is being named in the campaign materials?â or âWhat institution has the power to end the campaign by adopting the demands of the campaigners?â
In the case of animal welfare campaigns against foodservice providers, it seems like thatâs clearly the foodservice companies themselves. Then, in the process of that campaign, one thing youâll do is raise awareness about the issue among that companyâs customers (e.g. THLâs âfoodservice provider guideâ which raised awareness among public institutions), which isnât all that different from raising awareness among the public in a campaign targeting a B2C company.
I suppose this is just a semantic disagreement, but in practice, it suggests to me that B2B businesses are still vulnerable, in part because they arenât insulated from public opinionâtheyâre just one degree removed from it.
EDIT: Another, much stronger piece of evidence in favor of influence on B2B: Chicken Watch reports 586 commitments secured from food manufacturers and 60 from distributors. Some of those companies are functionally B2C (e.g. manufacturing consumer packaged goods sold under their own brand) but some are clearly B2B (e.g. Perdue Farmsâ BCC commitment).
No this seems more than just semantic. It does seem like Iâve underestimated the ability to influence B2B companies. I stand corrected. Thank you.
Great name choice!
Similar campaigns have worked really well for animal advocacy, so Iâm excited to see what you can accomplish.
Iâm wondering, what kinds of tasks can volunteers help with? If I have no social media accounts or experience trying to promote causes on social media is there anything I can do?
Thank you!
Youâre right that the main tasks are digital advocacyâbut even if youâre not on social media, there are some direct outreach tasks that involve emailing and calling specific stakeholders. We have one task like that live on our action hub now, and will be adding more soon.
Outside of that, we could use all sorts of general volunteer supportâanything from campaign recruitment to writing content. Also always eager to hear advice on strategy. Would love to chat more if youâre interested.
Interesting project.
Definitely seems like someone should be experimenting with this.