I included this story as a short anecdote about Marcus’s ability to spot talent, make active investments, and convince founders to take the leap, all of which I expect to transfer into helping start great AI x Animal orgs. I understand that different people in EA/AI safety have different takes about whether Mechanize specifically is good or bad—I happen to think good or at least neutral.
(And I take responsibility for any factual errors with this specific anecdote. Talking to Marcus just now, it seems like his main nudge was to convince Ege/Matthew/Tamay that the nonprofit structure was wrong for what they wanted to accomplish.)
My strong default prior is that most forprofits are good for the world, along the standard arguments: gains from trade, Paul Graham on wealth, the finding that corporations only keep 2.2% of value created
Moreover, I like when people who share my values start valuable companies, because they often spend that money on projects that are good. Mechanize doesn’t seem that different than Asana, or maybe Microsoft in this regard. Tamay has taken the GWWC pledge; I find Matthew’s writing (eg on AI rights) very informative.
Object-level, it seems like Mechanize mostly sells good code RL environments to Anthropic. Across the community, opinions on accelerating Anthropic capabilities are also mixed, but on balance I lean pro.
I personally benefit a lot from the good coding capabilities that Claude Code provides. This stage of AI/LLM development seems broadly good to me.
(Nb, my view wouldn’t change if they were mostly selling to OpenAI or GDM or something.)
On minor level, some people view that leaving Epoch was somehow a betrayal of Epoch or the funding they received; this seems quite fake. I strongly support individuals’ rights to branch out and start new orgs. In any case, it seems like Epoch has continued to do well.
Kinda off topic but I’d love to have a canonical post for why most forprofits are good for the world that lists the standard arguments, if you or anyone else knows one. For now it’s just your comment that I’ll link to people ’^^
I included this story as a short anecdote about Marcus’s ability to spot talent, make active investments, and convince founders to take the leap, all of which I expect to transfer into helping start great AI x Animal orgs. I understand that different people in EA/AI safety have different takes about whether Mechanize specifically is good or bad—I happen to think good or at least neutral.
(And I take responsibility for any factual errors with this specific anecdote. Talking to Marcus just now, it seems like his main nudge was to convince Ege/Matthew/Tamay that the nonprofit structure was wrong for what they wanted to accomplish.)
Curious why you think Mechanise might be positive impact?
Thanks for asking!
My strong default prior is that most forprofits are good for the world, along the standard arguments: gains from trade, Paul Graham on wealth, the finding that corporations only keep 2.2% of value created
Moreover, I like when people who share my values start valuable companies, because they often spend that money on projects that are good. Mechanize doesn’t seem that different than Asana, or maybe Microsoft in this regard. Tamay has taken the GWWC pledge; I find Matthew’s writing (eg on AI rights) very informative.
Object-level, it seems like Mechanize mostly sells good code RL environments to Anthropic. Across the community, opinions on accelerating Anthropic capabilities are also mixed, but on balance I lean pro.
I personally benefit a lot from the good coding capabilities that Claude Code provides. This stage of AI/LLM development seems broadly good to me.
(Nb, my view wouldn’t change if they were mostly selling to OpenAI or GDM or something.)
On minor level, some people view that leaving Epoch was somehow a betrayal of Epoch or the funding they received; this seems quite fake. I strongly support individuals’ rights to branch out and start new orgs. In any case, it seems like Epoch has continued to do well.
Kinda off topic but I’d love to have a canonical post for why most forprofits are good for the world that lists the standard arguments, if you or anyone else knows one. For now it’s just your comment that I’ll link to people ’^^
I will consider this, thanks for the nudge!