In your recent Cold Takes post you disclosed that your wife owns equity in both OpenAI and Anthropic. (She was appointed to a VP position at OpenAI, as was her sibling, after you joined OpenAI’s board of directors[1]). In 2017, under your leadership, OpenPhil decided to generally stop publishing “relationship disclosures”. How do you intend to handle conflicts of interest, and transparency about them, going forward?
You wrote here that the first intervention that you’ll explore is AI safety standards that will be “enforced via self-regulation at first, and potentially government regulation later”. AI companies can easily end up with “self-regulation” that is mostly optimized to appear helpful, in order to avoid regulation by governments. Conflicts of interest can easily influence decisions w.r.t. regulating AI companies (mostly via biases and self-deception, rather than via conscious reasoning).
For context, my wife is the President and co-founder of Anthropic, and formerly worked at OpenAI.
80% of her equity in Anthropic is (not legally bindingly) pledged for donation. None of her equity in OpenAI is. She may pledge more in the future if there is a tangible compelling reason to do so.
I plan to be highly transparent about my conflict of interest, e.g. I regularly open meetings by disclosing it if I’m not sure the other person already knows about it, and I’ve often mentioned it when discussing related topics on Cold Takes.
I also plan to discuss the implications of my conflict of interest for any formal role I might take. It’s possible that my role in helping with safety standards will be limited to advising with no formal powers (it’s even possible that I’ll decide I simply can’t work in this area due to the conflict of interest, and will pursue one of the other interventions I’ve thought about).
But right now I’m just exploring options and giving non-authoritative advice, and that seems appropriate. (I’ll also note that I expect a lot of advice and opinions on standards to come from people who are directly employed by AI companies; while this does present a conflict of interest, and a more direct one than mine, I think it doesn’t and can’t mean they are excluded from relevant conversations.)
In your recent Cold Takes post you disclosed that your wife owns equity in both OpenAI and Anthropic. (She was appointed to a VP position at OpenAI, as was her sibling, after you joined OpenAI’s board of directors[1]). In 2017, under your leadership, OpenPhil decided to generally stop publishing “relationship disclosures”. How do you intend to handle conflicts of interest, and transparency about them, going forward?
You wrote here that the first intervention that you’ll explore is AI safety standards that will be “enforced via self-regulation at first, and potentially government regulation later”. AI companies can easily end up with “self-regulation” that is mostly optimized to appear helpful, in order to avoid regulation by governments. Conflicts of interest can easily influence decisions w.r.t. regulating AI companies (mostly via biases and self-deception, rather than via conscious reasoning).
EDIT: you joined OpenAI’s board of directors as part of a deal between OpenPhil and OpenAI that involved recommending a $30M grant to OpenAI.
Can Holden clarify if and if so what proportion of those shares in OpenAI and Anthropic are legally pledged for donation?
For context, my wife is the President and co-founder of Anthropic, and formerly worked at OpenAI.
80% of her equity in Anthropic is (not legally bindingly) pledged for donation. None of her equity in OpenAI is. She may pledge more in the future if there is a tangible compelling reason to do so.
I plan to be highly transparent about my conflict of interest, e.g. I regularly open meetings by disclosing it if I’m not sure the other person already knows about it, and I’ve often mentioned it when discussing related topics on Cold Takes.
I also plan to discuss the implications of my conflict of interest for any formal role I might take. It’s possible that my role in helping with safety standards will be limited to advising with no formal powers (it’s even possible that I’ll decide I simply can’t work in this area due to the conflict of interest, and will pursue one of the other interventions I’ve thought about).
But right now I’m just exploring options and giving non-authoritative advice, and that seems appropriate. (I’ll also note that I expect a lot of advice and opinions on standards to come from people who are directly employed by AI companies; while this does present a conflict of interest, and a more direct one than mine, I think it doesn’t and can’t mean they are excluded from relevant conversations.)
Thanks for the clarification.