Chris Leong

• Chris Leong 26 Sep 2026 13:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jen baik’s comment on: Build­ing the EA/​AI Safety Scene in San Fransisco

  No worries!
  
  Doing things is much more important than replying to messages. I’m glad you didn’t let this distract you.

  I am a bottleneck and I wonder if EA SF needs a proper proper organizer to take this to the next level.

  Have you tried talking to funders (or folks familar with how they generally think)? I would be surprised if there wasn’t funding available to support a team working on EA/​AIS fieldbuilding if the right folks were involved.
  
  I agree that there’s a division between creating a community with good vibes and running professional events. This feels like quite a logical division of labour.

• Chris Leong 26 Sep 2026 5:01 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: Build­ing the EA/​AI Safety Scene in San Fransisco

  “In general, I think all 5 strands make sense: mass outreach, online community, conference, AIS fundamentals, advising. Overall, “more dakka” seems great. If Mox had more money, we could easily turn up the dial on making these things happen”
  
  Has someone tried pitching ambitious SF fieldbuilding to funders? Maybe not Mox though given recent controversies...

  I feel like these approaches are still more generic for general AIS/​EA fieldbuilding, but the shape of fieldbuilding for SF might be particularly different, because a lot of the people you care about reaching are very busy, have high opportunity costs. They’re Anthropic or OpenAI employees, or maybe city staffers and policy people

  I agree that if you can directly reach these people, it is probably more valuable (though this is only something that people should attempt if they can operate at a very high level; Mox might be able to do this given how well Manifest was run; I’m unsure how much AI lab employees care about the whole Caroline Ellison thing.

• Chris Leong 26 Sep 2026 4:50 UTC

  −2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Shawna Lee’s comment on: Good Se­nior Peo­ple Ex­ist and We’re Wast­ing Them

  There is a LOT of room for personal bias in that assessment

  
  Indeed. However, I would say that if you don’t trust your own judgement (or at least your ability to develop good judgement over time), then maybe you shouldn’t be running an org?

• Chris Leong 21 Sep 2026 15:37 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Ge­offrey Miller’s Quick takes

  I wouldn’t assume that Trump’s attacks will be an ongoing thing. Responding may simply draw more attacks. Honestly, I think we should just brush it off. Maybe his attention moves onto something else next week.

• Chris Leong 21 Sep 2026 1:52 UTC

  14 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Ge­offrey Miller’s Quick takes

  It’s not actually clear that we actually should respond. There’s a lot of aura in deciding that attacks are beneath you and you’re not going to respond to them.

• Chris Leong 17 Sep 2026 5:01 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies: One Year Closer

  Why not publish a new edition with additional commentary? I think there would be demand.

• Chris Leong 5 Sep 2026 9:31 UTC

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Good Se­nior Peo­ple Ex­ist and We’re Wast­ing Them

  A few thoughts:
  a) “Rejected or never heard back at the first stage and left confused”—if someone clearly isn’t good cultural fit, then identifying this at the first stage is the ideal outcome as it saves the time of both parties.
  b) “Rejected at the final stage having wasted lots of time without useful feedback”—unfortunately, if someone is a bad cultural fit, then it’s hard to provide feedback without coming off as rude. Additionally, it’s hard to provide any feedback on this at all without making it easier for candidates to hide their lack of cultural fit.
  c) “Many of the “unicorns” fall into one of two buckets with very few of the people I’ve spoken to falling in the middle. Many also swap between buckets without consistency”—Honestly, I’d take wrapping between the buckets without consistency as a red flag rather than a sign that the selectors were wrong. After all, in this case they seem to have failed both the immediate gut check and the more considered reflection of people who wanted to be open minded and let them advance.
  d) “It also seems like many orgs want ops people (even those on the hard ops side) to have excellent AIS knowledge and fluency, even though this is not required for the role”—I think there’s a lot of benefits of having a unified organisational culture so you’re all rowing in the same direction. If you hire someone who is only suited for a particular role, then you have less flexibilty in the future to promote them into other roles. You’re also providing them with an implicit endorsement which may lead to them being hired into roles they’d be unsuited for in the future by other folks.
  e) “A few hiring managers I’ve spoken to are very wary of hiring senior folks who haven’t come from EA/​ rat circles citing individual bad experiences with such people. This feels pretty uncharitable given how many bad students there are compared to the few good students who get hired”—Is it charitable to dismiss the accounts of folks who wanted to be open minded and tried hiring such folks and then learned lessons from it? I’m not saying these hires can’t work, just that the reasons for why they may not work are very subtle and I’d be much more enthuastic about your project if you were better able to steelman the opposing perspective (see also Chesterton’s Fence).
  f) “While it is true a bad senior hire can be more expensive than a bad junior hire, we can get far more information about the track record of senior people from their experience.”—that doesn’t really help if the issue is that the candidate is highly competent, but a poor cultural fit.
  g) “Frustratingly, lots of these candidates do well/​ are silver medalists in hiring rounds and are never passed on anywhere else”—If a candidate was almost but not quite good enough to land the role, you might want to pass them on. On the other hand, if a candidate is a poor culture fit, you’re much less likely to want to pass them on.
  h) “I would push these people to consider whether increased legibility of AI Safety due to recent warning shots and political salience could unlock much faster transitions that we aren’t capitalising on”—I expect that warning shots help because it reduces the epistemic distance between the AIS community and the rest of the world, but I’m unsure why you think political salience would help rather than hurt. I tend to agree with Eliezer that Politics is the Mindkiller.
  i) “Most of these people have done several BlueDot courses”—I’ve also facilitated for BlueDot. These courses do a lot of things well, but we shouldn’t be expecting these courses to be fixing the problem of cultural fit. Cultural fit is the kind of thing that is hard to address with an online format. I expect BlueDot’s Context Week is much more likely to be the right format for this. I also agree that local hubs are a good way of supporting this (I’m trying to do what I can at the Sydney AI Safety Space).
  i) Despite everything I’ve said, seeing how many rounds closed without a hire suggests that we desperately need more talent and so I really do hope your project goes well, even if I think the challenge is much harder than you anticipate. Feel free to reach out if I can assist in any way.

• Chris Leong 29 Aug 2026 17:58 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: case­bash’s Shortform

  There’s an old Facebook group, New EA hub search and planning, that might be worth reviving in light of the incresed amount of funding coming into the space.
  
  Even with more availability of funding, many talented folks won’t get funded or will only recieve small amounts. Establishing new hubs that provide an easier entry-way to being surrounded by community seems like potentially quite high value. After all, it takes a village to raise an EA and being surrounded by others is an accelerator to impact.

• Chris Leong 27 Aug 2026 22:27 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AI Safety Hub Free Agency: Creat­ing New AI Safety Hubs Around the World

  1. Sydney has an AI Safety Hub, but it’s far from it’s potential. Unfortunately, this isn’t anyone’s main focus right now.

  2. I’d talk to Yanni who runs TARA. He’s running ML bootcamps in a bunch of cities and he’s planning to scale this further. The graduates of his program could form the seeds of a new hub.

  3. I think this is a cool idea, esp. re: sharing of resources and I’d be excited to see if your free agent plan works. However, I’m honestly pretty skeptical of your city prioritisation and that dramatically reduces my estimation of the value of this project as far in my books. I expect this would also reduce the chance of the project being funded.

• Chris Leong 26 Aug 2026 5:07 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AISR’s comment on: AI Safety Needs Mid-Ca­reer On-Ramps

  One worry, which only applies to certain classes of MCP, is that folks may try to take what they’re doing already and reframe it as AIS, without checking whether the ToC makes sense, BC of the increasing status and funding associated with AIS.

• Chris Leong 22 Aug 2026 10:14 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AI Safety Needs Mid-Ca­reer On-Ramps

  They just need to be upskilled on the AI safety component, which I believe could be done to a reasonable degree with maybe a week’s worth of reading and a weekend-long workshop.

  
  I’m pretty skeptical of this. Then again, it depends on the actual role. Maybe for an ops person you just want them to understand the basics and then they can pick up the rest over time.

  It’s a bit unreasonable to ask someone established to quit their job, take a massive pay cut, and join a weird three-month thing with no guarantee of a stable job on the other side.

  It’s not clear to me that this isn’t good actually in that it filters for people who really are committed.
  
  Actually, I don’t want to go that far because some people have family commitments that would be a blocker regardless of how committed they are, but IMHO commitment selection filters are underrated.

  That’s a big ask. Every ounce of friction and doubt you can remove matters.

  I don’t actually know if we want to remove all of the frictions. See Chesteron’s Fence. I would be surprised if you knew who was or wasn’t value-aligned or committed before the workshop.

  Step one: more Praxis-like events.

  I would be excited to see this too. Though honestly, I would be less excited by the ability to recruit some of the participants (immediate effect) than the potential to perculate these ideas into a particular scene (medium and long-term effect). I am also somewhat wary of recruiting too heavily from the debating scene—there are many brilliant debaters, but are they just going to very persuasively convince us to pursue the wrong strategy?

  Cover the field wide, not deep

  Agreed. People can only learn so much in a short program. It’s best to accept this and to see if you can spark a passion or interest in them, because if you succeed here, they’ll learn about the area themselves.

  Resist it. A participant who leaves motivated will go learn the camps on their own

  I’m more pessimistic than you. I really like the work of Wittgensten, a philosopher of language (“a langauge is a way of life”, “if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him”). People can pick up a shallow version of the other perspectives themselves, but learning how to step into another way of seeing the world is actually something that most people need scaffolding for.
  
  I think that the strongest argument for a lot of your positions is that if you think RSI is imminent we should make a lot of decisions that would be long-term damaging for the community in order to gain short-term value. That could be the right decision, but if we decide to do that, we should pursue that consciously.

Read­ing List on Wise AI

• Chris Leong 14 Aug 2026 10:28 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: On De­moc­ra­tiz­ing ASI to Pre­serve Civil Liberties

  People talk about “democratising” AI. I prefer the term “despotising” AI. That is, uploading the weights on the internet so that despots around the world can download AI to use to oppress their people in a permissionless fashion. Even better (for the despots, at least), it doesn’t just provide them with the tools to oppress their population, but it also provides them with an credible excuse to do so. After all, with the right AI tools individuals are more than capable of causing significant harm. The despots don’t just get to oppress their populations, they also get to present themselves as heroes for doing so.

• Chris Leong 7 Aug 2026 20:49 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: AI safety prizes

  Could staple some money to it but prestige is probably the main prize

  
  Money can help bootstrap prestige.

• Chris Leong 3 Aug 2026 12:51 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AI Safety Ca­reer Fair & Builders Sum­mit SF—Retrospective

  Hey Jen,
  
  Just thought I’d share my essay, which won a runner-up prize in the Manifund Essay Competition on Building the EA/​AI Safety Scene in San Francisco with you in case it is of any use (I tried to PM you, but I ran into a bug).
  
  Obviously, take it with a massive grain of salt: 1) I don’t live in SF 2) you’ve actually been running things in SF which is much more informative than just theorising about what should be done like I did with my post 3) The best strategy for you to pursue is highly contingent on your own individual skills and fit.
  
  Best,
  
  Chris

As­tral Codex: Break­down in Pakistan

[Question] What should the EA com­mu­nity be do­ing now that the (AIS) Over­ton win­dow has opened up again?

• Chris Leong 21 Jul 2026 9:51 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Against the AI fram­ing mul­ti­verse: In­tro­duc­ing AI StopWatch

  At AI StopWatch, we typically post between two and five times a day, seven days a week. Every evening, we compile the day’s posts — which are low on jargon, high on water cooler discussability (we hope) — into an email-friendly “Daily Digest,” which we also release as a ~10-20 minute audio podcast a few hours later.

  
  I would guess that would be very resource-intensive. How much FTE staff do you have working on this?

• Chris Leong 17 Jul 2026 13:56 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Help us launch AI safety uni­ver­sity groups by refer­ring po­ten­tial founders

  Is this US only?

• Chris Leong 6 Jul 2026 6:20 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: alejoacelas 🔸’s comment on: Maybe do the thing you wish CEA would do

  80% chance I can add a few comments if someone produces a draft curriculum. (Alternatively, I might be able to join a call).