The best one-stop summary I know of is still Scott Alexander’s In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism from late 2023. I’m curious to see if anyone has an updated take, if not I’ll keep steering folks there:
Here’s a short, very incomplete list of things effective altruism has accomplished in its ~10 years of existence. I’m counting it as an EA accomplishment if EA either provided the funding or did the work, further explanations in the footnotes. I’m also slightly conflating EA, rationalism, and AI doomerism rather than doing the hard work of teasing them apart:
Global Health And Development
Saved about 200,000 lives total, mostly from malaria1
Treated 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection.2
Given 5 million people access to clean drinking water.3
Supported clinical trials for both the RTS.S malaria vaccine (currently approved!) and the R21/Matrix malaria vaccine (on track for approval)4
Supported additional research into vaccines for syphilis, malaria, helminths, and hepatitis C and E.5
Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.6
Animal Welfare:
Convinced farms to switch 400 million chickens from caged to cage-free.7
Freed 500,000 pigs from tiny crates where they weren’t able to move around8
Gotten 3,000 companies including Pepsi, Kelloggs, CVS, and Whole Foods to commit to selling low-cruelty meat.
AI:
Developed RLHF, a technique for controlling AI output widely considered the key breakthrough behind ChatGPT.9
…and other major AI safety advances, including RLAIF and the foundations of AI interpretability10.
Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.11
Helped convince OpenAI to dedicate 20% of company resources to a team working on aligning future superintelligences.
Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models for dangerous behavior before releasing them.
Got two seats on the board of OpenAI, held majority control of OpenAI for one wild weekend, and still apparently might have some seats on the board of OpenAI, somehow?12
Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.13
Helped (probably, I have no secret knowledge) the Biden administration pass what they called “the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.”
Won the PR war: a recent poll shows that 70% of US voters believe that mitigating extinction risk from AI should be a “global priority”.
Other:
Helped organize the SecureDNA consortium, which helps DNA synthesis companies figure out what their customers are requesting and avoid accidentally selling bioweapons to terrorists14.
Provided a significant fraction of all funding for DC groups trying to lower the risk of nuclear war.15
Played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement—I’m as surprised by this one as you are, but see footnote for evidence17.
I think other people are probably thinking of this as par for the course—all of these seem like the sort of thing a big movement should be able to do. But I remember when EA was three philosophers and few weird Bay Area nerds with a blog. It clawed its way up into the kind of movement that could do these sorts of things by having all the virtues it claims to have: dedication, rationality, and (I think) genuine desire to make the world a better place.
The best one-stop summary I know of is still Scott Alexander’s In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism from late 2023. I’m curious to see if anyone has an updated take, if not I’ll keep steering folks there: