Anthropic was started by a bunch of EAs/​ EA interested people, and it still contains a bunch of EAs/​ EA interested people.
On plausible assumptions (i.e. if Anthropic stays an extremely valuable AI company, it goes public at some point in the next few years, and at that point, employees who have equity sell some of it), several ~EA-aligned employees of Anthropic could become (multi?) billionaires.
They may want to spend that money quickly, especially if they expect the world to be unpredictable post-intelligence explosion.
This may mean drastically more funding for EA. Depending on Anthropic’s valuation, this could be more than 100 billion/​ year.
Some questions for this thread:
How plausible do you find this basic story? What odds would you put on Anthropic going public/​ employees giving billions to EA aligned causes?
The general vibe was that EA as a community was unprepared for the influx of money from FTX in 2022, and this had some negative effects on the culture. If we assumed that a similar or larger amount of money would be injected into EA-aligned causes in 2027… how could we prepare better this time?
What else should we do in preparation for scenarios where an unprecedented amount of money is available? For example, can we put together the groundwork for mega-projects that can accept very large amounts of funding?
Possible funding coming from Anthropic staff may be correlated in terms of their opinions — for an obvious example, they’ll probably be pro-Anthropic. How can we make sure that correlated funder opinions don’t distort community epistemics?
PS—I heard this idea from @calebp. He’s thought about this more than me, and might be able to share some more of his thoughts on the Forum soon.
PPS—this very short post represents all my thinking on the topic apart from ‘this seems important’. I’m not the one to ask for more info, and I have no non-public knowledge.
Possible Anthropic billionaires: discussion thread
Anthropic was started by a bunch of EAs/​ EA interested people, and it still contains a bunch of EAs/​ EA interested people.
On plausible assumptions (i.e. if Anthropic stays an extremely valuable AI company, it goes public at some point in the next few years, and at that point, employees who have equity sell some of it), several ~EA-aligned employees of Anthropic could become (multi?) billionaires.
They may want to spend that money quickly, especially if they expect the world to be unpredictable post-intelligence explosion.
This may mean drastically more funding for EA. Depending on Anthropic’s valuation, this could be more than 100 billion/​ year.
Some questions for this thread:
How plausible do you find this basic story? What odds would you put on Anthropic going public/​ employees giving billions to EA aligned causes?
The general vibe was that EA as a community was unprepared for the influx of money from FTX in 2022, and this had some negative effects on the culture. If we assumed that a similar or larger amount of money would be injected into EA-aligned causes in 2027… how could we prepare better this time?
What else should we do in preparation for scenarios where an unprecedented amount of money is available? For example, can we put together the groundwork for mega-projects that can accept very large amounts of funding?
Possible funding coming from Anthropic staff may be correlated in terms of their opinions — for an obvious example, they’ll probably be pro-Anthropic. How can we make sure that correlated funder opinions don’t distort community epistemics?
PS—I heard this idea from @calebp. He’s thought about this more than me, and might be able to share some more of his thoughts on the Forum soon.
PPS—this very short post represents all my thinking on the topic apart from ‘this seems important’. I’m not the one to ask for more info, and I have no non-public knowledge.