Possible Anthropic billionaires: discussion thread
Anthropic was started by a bunch of EAs/â EA interested people, and it still contains a bunch of EAs/â 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 Anthropicâs valuation, this could be more than 100 billion/â year.
Some questions for this thread:
How plausible do you find this basic story? What odds would you put on Anthropic going public/â 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 â for an obvious example, theyâll probably be pro-Anthropic. How can we make sure that correlated funder opinions donât distort community epistemics?
PSâI heard this idea from @calebp. Heâs thought about this more than me, and might be able to share some more of his thoughts on the Forum soon.
PPSâthis very short post represents all my thinking on the topic apart from âthis seems importantâ. Iâm not the one to ask for more info, and I have no non-public knowledge.
Good question, itâs a good idea to think about this in advance.
Some thoughts:
Itâs pretty unlikely that Anthropic goes public at a time that matters. Much more likely is that either AGI happens and everyone dies; or AGI happens and the economy is radically transformed to the point that things like âgoing publicâ donât make sense anymore; or AI progress fizzles and Anthropic canât support the growth that investors expect, and it shuts down or radically contracts.
A more likely scenario is that Anthropic has a tender offer where early employees can sell a lot of equity.
But tender offers are still limited in scope. Plus, the people with the most equityâfounders/âexecsâoften donât sell much equity because they want to signal confidence to investors. If you multiply the discounts due to (1) tender offer will have a cap on sales, (2) biggest equity holders probably wonât sell much, (3) sellers will only donate some fraction of their equity, I would be surprised if a tender offer resulted in more than $1 billion for EA causesâwhich is great, but wouldnât change the ecosystem the way FTX did. On the other hand, Anthropic donors might want to spend down very quickly due to short timelines. $1 billion spent over two years would definitely change the funding ecosystem.
There a high chance that we wonât figure out how to align AI and it will kill everyone, and the best move is a global ban on ASI. People at Anthropic will disproportionately disagree with me about this, because (1) people who believe that will mostly not go to work at an AI company, and (2) among those who do believe that, many will be influenced by their colleagues to change their minds. So I donât expect to see much increase in funding for the interventions that look best by my lights.