Does anyone work at, or know somebody who works at Cohere?
Last November their CEO Aidan Gomez published an anti-effective-altruism internal letter/memo (Bloomberg reporting here, apparently confirmed as true though no further comment)
I got the vibe from Twitter/X that Aidan didn’t like EA, but making an internal statement about it to your company seems really odd to me? Like why do your engineers and project managers need to know about your anti-EA opinions to build their products? Maybe it came after the AI Safety Summit?
Does anyone in the AI Safety Space of EA have any knowledge or context to help out here?
Ideally I’d like to read the memo and see what it’s definition of EA is and what its arguments are.
Given Cohere are a leading, though not frontier-level, AI company feels like it’s bad to have a fairly prominent CEO who hates EA so much he releases internal memos about it to the company.
I don’t think it’s odd at all. As the Bloomberg article notes, this was in response to the martyrdom of Saint Altman, when everyone thought the evil Effective Altruists were stealing/smashing OA for no reason and destroying humanity’s future (as well as the fortune of many of the individuals involved, to a degree few of them bothered to disclose) and/or turning it over to the Chinese commies. An internal memo decrying ‘Effective Altruism’ was far from the most extreme response at the time; but I doubt Gomez would write it today, if only because so much news has come out since then and it no longer looks like such a simple morality play. (For example, a lot of SV people were shocked to learn he had been fired from YC by Paul Graham et al for the same reason. That was a very closely held secret.)
Ah good point that it was in the aftermath of the OpenAI board weekend, but it still seems like a very extreme/odd reaction to me (though I have to note the benefit of hindsight as well as my own personal biases). I still think it’d be interesting to see what Aidan actually said, and/or why he’s formed such a negative opinion of EA, but I think your right than the simplest explanation here is:
Sam gets fired → I think evil EA is behind it → I need to show how not-EA I am → release anti-EA internal memo
I’d be a bit surprised if you could find people on this forum who (still) work at Cohere. Hard to see a stronger signal to interview elsewhere than your CEO explaining in a public memo why they hate you.
but making an internal statement about it to your company seems really odd to me? Like why do your engineers and project managers need to know about your anti-EA opinions to build their products?
I agree it’s odd in the sense that most companies don’t do it. I see it as a attempt to enforce a certain kind of culture (promoting conformity, discouragement of dissent, “just build now” at the expense of ethics, etc) that I don’t much care for. But the CEO also made it abundantly clear he doesn’t like people who think like me either, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Does anyone work at, or know somebody who works at Cohere?
Last November their CEO Aidan Gomez published an anti-effective-altruism internal letter/memo (Bloomberg reporting here, apparently confirmed as true though no further comment)
I got the vibe from Twitter/X that Aidan didn’t like EA, but making an internal statement about it to your company seems really odd to me? Like why do your engineers and project managers need to know about your anti-EA opinions to build their products? Maybe it came after the AI Safety Summit?
Does anyone in the AI Safety Space of EA have any knowledge or context to help out here?
Ideally I’d like to read the memo and see what it’s definition of EA is and what its arguments are.
Given Cohere are a leading, though not frontier-level, AI company feels like it’s bad to have a fairly prominent CEO who hates EA so much he releases internal memos about it to the company.
I don’t think it’s odd at all. As the Bloomberg article notes, this was in response to the martyrdom of Saint Altman, when everyone thought the evil Effective Altruists were stealing/smashing OA for no reason and destroying humanity’s future (as well as the fortune of many of the individuals involved, to a degree few of them bothered to disclose) and/or turning it over to the Chinese commies. An internal memo decrying ‘Effective Altruism’ was far from the most extreme response at the time; but I doubt Gomez would write it today, if only because so much news has come out since then and it no longer looks like such a simple morality play. (For example, a lot of SV people were shocked to learn he had been fired from YC by Paul Graham et al for the same reason. That was a very closely held secret.)
Ah good point that it was in the aftermath of the OpenAI board weekend, but it still seems like a very extreme/odd reaction to me (though I have to note the benefit of hindsight as well as my own personal biases). I still think it’d be interesting to see what Aidan actually said, and/or why he’s formed such a negative opinion of EA, but I think your right than the simplest explanation here is:
I’d be a bit surprised if you could find people on this forum who (still) work at Cohere. Hard to see a stronger signal to interview elsewhere than your CEO explaining in a public memo why they hate you.
I agree it’s odd in the sense that most companies don’t do it. I see it as a attempt to enforce a certain kind of culture (promoting conformity, discouragement of dissent, “just build now” at the expense of ethics, etc) that I don’t much care for. But the CEO also made it abundantly clear he doesn’t like people who think like me either, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.