One thing that this piece is missing: the extent to which Anthropic is now implicitly the cultural/financial/leadership center of EA.
Habryka has claimed that most EA talent is in Anthropic; I haven’t tried to evaluate this, and it depends on how you measure talent, but it doesn’t seem too far off. (Edit: as per this link, Habryka was actually talking about EA AI safety talent.)
It seems very plausible to me that the rest of EA will mainly end up serving as a recruiting pipeline for Anthropic. I’m interested in understanding the extent to which this is already happening.
This mostly seems bad to me, and therefore another argument against the view that student group success should be measured by career placements.
Habryka has claimed that most EA talent is in Anthropic; I haven’t tried to evaluate this, and it depends on how you measure talent, but it doesn’t seem too far off.
Habryka was talking about the subset of EA that does AI Safety—EA as a whole has much more talent than that.
One thing that this piece is missing: the extent to which Anthropic is now implicitly the cultural/financial/leadership center of EA.
It seems very plausible to me that the rest of EA will mainly end up serving as a recruiting pipeline for Anthropic. I’m interested in understanding the extent to which this is already happening.
I do think a lot of EAs are desperately hoping for an Anthropic IPO so they can help save millions of lives, prevent billions of animal-suffering years, build up resilience to pandemics, and do much more AI safety work. So Anthropic may become the financial center of EA, but at this point it’s only in expectation. Also, I don’t see how Anthropic is the cultural/leadership center of EA. Jobs at Anthropic are a tiny percent of the jobs that 80k recommends. Maybe I’m not aware of it, but I don’t think people at Anthropic get a significant fraction of the current karma on the EA Forum, and I’m pretty sure not historically. Could you explain more your reasoning?
I don’t think it’s currently true that Anthropic is the cultural center of EA, but if it ends up driving most of EA money, then it could become so. On my view that’s plausibly quite bad because typical Anthropic views about AI are far too reckless and too likely to get us all killed.
There is a possibly optimistic outcome here: That some significant portion of future donations will be put towards epistemic cultivation, criticism and diversity of thought in EA. In a sense, I think the Survival and Flourishing ecosystem is already spearheading interesting directions here, with a focus on AI epistemic tooling. Hopefully more will follow in diverse but similar directions, also looking to serve the EA community, or the questions we used to ask.
One thing that this piece is missing: the extent to which Anthropic is now implicitly the cultural/financial/leadership center of EA.
Habryka has claimed that most EA talent is in Anthropic; I haven’t tried to evaluate this, and it depends on how you measure talent, but it doesn’t seem too far off.(Edit: as per this link, Habryka was actually talking about EA AI safety talent.)It seems very plausible to me that the rest of EA will mainly end up serving as a recruiting pipeline for Anthropic. I’m interested in understanding the extent to which this is already happening.
This mostly seems bad to me, and therefore another argument against the view that student group success should be measured by career placements.
Previous discussion in this tweet thread: https://x.com/richardmcngo/status/2055991804319658273?s=46
Habryka was talking about the subset of EA that does AI Safety—EA as a whole has much more talent than that.
I do think a lot of EAs are desperately hoping for an Anthropic IPO so they can help save millions of lives, prevent billions of animal-suffering years, build up resilience to pandemics, and do much more AI safety work. So Anthropic may become the financial center of EA, but at this point it’s only in expectation. Also, I don’t see how Anthropic is the cultural/leadership center of EA. Jobs at Anthropic are a tiny percent of the jobs that 80k recommends. Maybe I’m not aware of it, but I don’t think people at Anthropic get a significant fraction of the current karma on the EA Forum, and I’m pretty sure not historically. Could you explain more your reasoning?
I don’t think it’s currently true that Anthropic is the cultural center of EA, but if it ends up driving most of EA money, then it could become so. On my view that’s plausibly quite bad because typical Anthropic views about AI are far too reckless and too likely to get us all killed.
There is a possibly optimistic outcome here: That some significant portion of future donations will be put towards epistemic cultivation, criticism and diversity of thought in EA. In a sense, I think the Survival and Flourishing ecosystem is already spearheading interesting directions here, with a focus on AI epistemic tooling. Hopefully more will follow in diverse but similar directions, also looking to serve the EA community, or the questions we used to ask.