Has Holden written any updates on outcomes associated with the grant?
Not to my knowledge.
I don’t think that lobbying against OpenAI, other adversarial action, would have been that hard.
It seems like once OpenAI was created and had disrupted the “nascent spirit of cooperation”, even if OpenAI went away (like, the company and all its employees magically disappeared), the culture/people’s orientation to AI stuff (“which monkey gets the poison banana” etc.) wouldn’t have been reversible. So I don’t know if there was anything Open Phil could have done to OpenAI in 2017 to meaningfully change the situation in 2022 (other than like, slowing AI timelines by a bit). Or maybe you mean some more complicated plan like ‘adversarial action against OpenAI and any other AI labs that spring up later, and try to bring back the old spirit of cooperation, and get all the top people into DeepMind instead of spreading out among different labs’.
I don’t mean to say anything pro DeepMind and I’m not sure there is anything positive to say re: DeepMind.
I think that once the nascent spirit of cooperation is destroyed, you can indeed take the adversarial route. It’s not hard to imagine successful lobbying efforts that lead to regulation—most people are in fact skeptical of tech giants wielding tons of power using AI! Among other things known to slow progress and hinder organizations. It is beyond me why such things are so rarely discussed or considered. I’m sure that Open Phil and 80k open cooperation with OpenAI has a big part in shaping narrative away from this kind of thing.
Not to my knowledge.
It seems like once OpenAI was created and had disrupted the “nascent spirit of cooperation”, even if OpenAI went away (like, the company and all its employees magically disappeared), the culture/people’s orientation to AI stuff (“which monkey gets the poison banana” etc.) wouldn’t have been reversible. So I don’t know if there was anything Open Phil could have done to OpenAI in 2017 to meaningfully change the situation in 2022 (other than like, slowing AI timelines by a bit). Or maybe you mean some more complicated plan like ‘adversarial action against OpenAI and any other AI labs that spring up later, and try to bring back the old spirit of cooperation, and get all the top people into DeepMind instead of spreading out among different labs’.
I don’t mean to say anything pro DeepMind and I’m not sure there is anything positive to say re: DeepMind.
I think that once the nascent spirit of cooperation is destroyed, you can indeed take the adversarial route. It’s not hard to imagine successful lobbying efforts that lead to regulation—most people are in fact skeptical of tech giants wielding tons of power using AI! Among other things known to slow progress and hinder organizations. It is beyond me why such things are so rarely discussed or considered. I’m sure that Open Phil and 80k open cooperation with OpenAI has a big part in shaping narrative away from this kind of thing.