Head of Video at 80,000 Hours
(Opinions here my own by default though will sometimes speak in a professional capacity).
Personal website: www.chanamessinger.com
ChanaMessinger
Karma: 4,317
I think others at 80k are best placed to answer this (for time zone reasons I’m most active in this thread right now), but for what it’s worth, I’m worried about the loss at the top of the EA funnel! I think it’s worth it overall, but I think this is definitely a hit.
That said, I’m not sure AI risk has to be abstract or speculative! AI is everywhere, I think feels very real to some people, can feel realer than others, and the problems we’re encountering are rapidly less speculative (we have papers showing at least some amount of alignment faking, scheming, obfuscation of chain of thought, reward hacking, all that stuff!)
One question I have is how much it will be the case in the future that people looking for a general “doing good” framework will in fact bounce off of the new 80k. For instance, it could be the case that AI is so ubiquitous that it would feel totally out of touch to not be discussing it a lot. More compellingly to me, I think it’s 80k’s job to make the connection; doing good in the current world requires taking AI and its capabilities and risks seriously. We are in an age of AI, and that has implications for all possible routes to doing good.
I like your take on reputation considerations; I think lots of us will definitely have to eat non-zero crow if things really plateau, but I think the evidence is strong enough to care deeply about this and prioritize it, and I don’t want to obscure that we believe that for the reputational benefit.
Hey Zach,
(Responding as an 80k team member, though I’m quite new)
I appreciate this take; I was until recently working at CEA, and was in a lot of ways very very glad that Zach Robinson was all in on general EA. It remains the case (as I see it) that, from a strategic and moral point of view, there’s a ton of value in EA in general. It says what’s true in a clear and inspiring way, a lot of people are looking for a worldview that makes sense, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the future. (And, as you say, non-fanaticism and pluralistic elements have a lot to offer, and there are some lessons to be learned about this from the FTX era)
At the same time, when I look around the EA community, I want to see a set of institutions, organizations, funders and people that are live players, responding to the world as they see it, making sure they aren’t missing the biggest thing currently happening. (or, if like 80k they are an org where one of its main jobs is communicating important things, letting their audiences miss it.) Most importantly, I want people to act on their beliefs (with appropriate incorporation of heuristics, rules of thumb, outside views, etc). And to the extent that 80k staff and leadership’s beliefs changed with the new evidence, I’m excited for them to be acting on it.
I wasn’t involved in this strategic pivot, but when I was considering the job, I was excited to see a certain kind of leaping to action in the organization as I was considering whether to join.
It could definitely be a mistake even within this framework (by causing 80k to not appeal parts of its potential audience) or empirically (on size of AI risk, or sizes of other problems) or long term (because of the damage it does to the EA community or intellectual lifeblood / eating the seed corn). In the past I’ve worried that various parts of the community were jumping too fast into what’s shiny and new, but 80k has been talking about this for more than a year, which is reassuring.
I think the 80k leadership have thoughts about all of these, but I agree that this blog post alone doesn’t fully make the case.
I think the right answer to these uncertainties is some combination of digging in and arguing about them (as you’ve started here — maybe there’s a longer conversation to be had), or waiting and see how these bets turn out.
Anyway, I appreciate considerations like the ones you’ve laid out because I think they’ll help 80k figure out if it’s making a mistake (now or in the future), even though I’m currently really energized and excited by the strategic pivot.
We’ve started adding support for search operators in the search text box. Right now you can use the “user” operator to filter by author, and the “topic” operator to filter by topic, though these will currently only do exact matches and are case-sensitive. Note that there is already a topic filter on the left side, if that is more convenient for you.
Oooh I’m especially excited for this for comments, but it looks like it doesn’t work for comments, is that right?
I like the idea of past editions living somewhere (do they now?) to avoid link rot and allow looking at the history of things and etc. Maybe I’d advocate for putting them all somewhere CEA owns as well in case substack stops being the right place.
I wrote a letter!
I think it might describe how some people experienced internal double cruxing. I wouldn’t be that surprised if some people also found the ’debugging” frame in general to give too much agency to others relative to themselves, I feel like I’ve heard that discussed.
Love this, and love that there was also audio
Post: OAI NDA drama, do we know that Anthropic does not do similar things? I heard something that reassured me but I no longer know what it was. Interested in what people have heard or know (feel free to DM me) or general takes on the sitaution.
Huh—this both feels like something I’m sympathetic to worrying about and matches what I’ve seen people say about similar issues around the internet. Why does it seem uncharitable to you?
I appreciate the tone and my read of the aim of this—feels like it’s trying to clarify what’s at stake and cause more understanding and better discussion.
I’m not sure what you mean by “real way”. One of the central ways it’s culturally understood that that word and certain uses of “gay” are bad to use is to be contemptuous about things one doesn’t like or are insufficiently masculine. That seems like an important and real way it can be used for harm, not only literally meaning to call a gay person a slur.
I appreciate you writing this up. I think it might be worth people who know him putting some effort into setting up a chat. Very plausibly people are and I don’t know anything about it, but people might also underweight the value of a face to face conversation coming from someone who understands you and shares a lot of your worldview expressing concerns.
This is also a argument for the forum’s existence generally, if many of the arguments would otherwise be had on Twitter.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is starting a cross between a hedge fund and a think tank for AGI. I have read only the sections of Situational Awareness most relevant to this project, and I don’t feel nearly like I understand all the implications, so I could end up being quite wrong. Indeed, I’ve already updated towards a better and more nuanced understanding of Aschenbrenner’s points, in ways that have made me less concerned than I was to begin with. But I want to say publicly that the hedge fund idea makes me nervous.
Before I give my reasons, I want to say that it seems likely most of the relevant impact comes not from the hedge fund but from the influence the ideas from Situational Awareness have on policymakers and various governments, as well as the influence and power Aschenbrenner and any cohort he builds wield. This influence may come from this hedge fund or be entirely incidental to it. I mostly do not address this here, but it does make all of the below less important.
I also believe that some (though not all) of my concerns about the hedge fund are based on specific disagreements with Aschenbrenner’s views. I discuss some of those below, but a full rebuttal this is not (and many of the points of disagreement I don’t yet feel confident in my view on). There is still plenty to do to hash out the actual empirical questions at hand.
Why I am nervous
A hedge fund investing in AI related investments means Aschenbrenner and his investors will gain financially from more and accelerated AGI progress. This seems to me to be one of the most important dynamics (excluding the points about influence above). That creates an incentive to create more AGI progress, even at the cost of safety, which seems quite concerning. I will say that Leopold has a good track record here around turning down money in not signing an NDA at Open AI despite loss of equity.
Aschenbrenner expresses strong support for the liberal democratic world to maintain a lead on AI advancement, and ensure that China does not reach an AI-based decisive military advantage over the United States[1]. The hedge fund, then, presumably aims to both support the goal of maintaining an AI lead over China and profit off of it. In my current view, this approach increases race dynamics and increases the risks of the worst outcomes (though my view on this has softened somewhat since my first draft, for reasons similar to what Zvi clarifies here[2]).
I especially think that it risks unnecessary competition when cooperation—the best outcome—could still be possible. It seems notable, for example, that no Chinese version of the Situational Awareness piece has come to my attention; going first in such a game both ensures you are first and that the game is played at all.
It’s also important that the investors (e.g. Patrick Collison) appear to be more focused on economic and technological development, and less concerned about risks from AI. The incentives of this hedge fund are therefore likely to point towards progress and away from slowing down for safety reasons.
There are other potential lines of thought here I have not yet fleshed out including:
The value of aiming to orient the US government and military attention to AGI (seems like a huge move with unclear sign)
The degree to which this move is unilateralist on Aschenbrenner’s part
How much money could be made and how much power the relevant people (e.g. Aschenbrenner and his investors) will have through investment and being connected to important decisions.
If a lot of money and/or power could be acquired, especially over AGI development, then there’s a healthy default skepticism I think should be applied to their actions and decision-making.
Specifics about Aschenbrenner himself. Different people in the same role would take very different actions, so specifics about his views, ways of thinking, and profile of strengths and weaknesses may be relevant.
Ways that the hedge fund could in fact be a good idea:
EA and AI causes could really use funder diversification. If Aschenbrenner intends to use the money he makes to support these issues, that could be very valuable (though I’ve certainly become somewhat more concerned with moonshot “become a billionaire to save the world” plans than I used to be).
The hedge fund could position Aschenbrenner to have a deep understanding of and connections within the AI landscape, making the think tank outputs very good, and causing important future decisions to be made better.
Aschenbrenner of course could be right about the value of the US government’s involvement, maintaining a US lead, and the importance of avoiding Chinese military supremacy over the US. In that case, him achieving his goals would of course be good. Cruxes include the likelihood of international cooperation, the possibility of international bans, probability of catastrophic outcomes from AI and the likelihood of “muddling through” on alignment.
I’m interested in hearing takes, ways I could be wrong, fleshing out of my arguments, or any other thoughts people have relevant to this. Happy to have private chats in DMs to discuss as well.
- ^
To be clear, Aschenbrenner wants that lead to exist to avoid a tight race in which safety and caution are thrown to the winds. If we can achieve that lead primarily through infosecurity (something he emphasizes), then added risks are low; but I think the views expressed in Situational Awareness also imply the importance of staying technologically ahead of China as their AI research improves. This comes with precisely the risks of creating and accelerating a race of this nature.
Additionally, when I read his description of the importance of even a two month lead, it implied to me that if the longer, more comfortable lead is lost, there will be strong reasons for the US to advance quickly so as to avoid China reaching superintelligence and subsequent military dominance first (which doesn’t mean he thinks we should actually do this if the time came). This seems to fairly explicitly describe the tight race scenario. I don’t think Aschenbrenner believes this would be a good situation to be in, but nonetheless thinks that’s what the true picture is.
- ^
From Zvi’s post: “He confirms he very much is NOT saying this:
The race to ASI is all that matters.
The race is inevitable.
We might lose.
We have to win.
Trying to win won’t mean all of humanity loses.
Therefore, we should do everything in our power to win.
I strongly disagree with this first argument. But so does Leopold.
Instead, he is saying something more like this:
ASI, how it is built and what we do with it, will be all that matters.
ASI is inevitable.
A close race to ASI between nations or labs almost certainly ends badly.
Our rivals getting to ASI first would also be very bad.
Along the way we by default face proliferation and WMDs, potential descent into chaos.
The only way to avoid a race is (at least soft) nationalization of the ASI effort.
With proper USG-level cybersecurity we can then maintain our lead.
We can then use that lead to ensure a margin of safety during the super risky and scary transition to superintelligence, and to negotiate from a position of strength.”
I was thinking about to what extent NDAs (either non-disclosure or non-disparagement agreements) played a role in the 2018 blowup at Alameda Research (since if there were a lot, that could be a throughline between messiness at Alameda and messiness at Open AI recently).
Here’s what I’ve collected from public records:
Not mentioned as far as I can tell in Going Infinite
Ben West: “I don’t want to speak for this person, but my own experience was pretty different. For example: Sam was fine with me telling prospective AR employees why I thought they shouldn’t join (and in fact I did do this),[4] and my severance agreement didn’t have any sort of non-disparagement clause. This comment says that none of the people who left had a non-disparagement clause, which seems like an obvious thing a person would do if they wanted to use force to prevent disparagement.[5]” From here
Kerry Vaughn: “Information about pre-2018 Alameda is difficult to obtain because the majority of those directly involved signed NDAs before their departure in exchange for severance payments. I am aware of only one employee who did not. The other people who can spreak freely on the topic are early investors in Alameda and members of the EA community who heard about Alameda from those directly involved before they signed their NDAs”. From here.
ftxthrowaway: “Lastly, my severance agreement didn’t have a non-disparagement clause, and I’m pretty sure no one’s did. I assume that you are not hearing from staff because they are worried about the looming shitstorm over FTX now, not some agreement from four years ago.” From here (it’s a response to the previous)
nbouscal: “I’m the person that Kerry was quoting here, and am at least one of the reasons he believed the others had signed agreements with non-disparagement clauses. I didn’t sign a severance agreement for a few reasons: I wanted to retain the ability to sue, I believed there was a non-disparagement clause, and I didn’t want to sign away rights to the ownership stake that I had been verbally told I would receive. Given that I didn’t actually sign it, I could believe that the non-disparagement clauses were removed and I didn’t know about it, and people have just been quiet for other reasons (of which there are certainly plenty).” From here (it’s a response to the previous)
Later says “I do think I was probably just remembering incorrectly about this to be honest, I looked back through things from then and it looks like there was a lot of back-and-forth about the inclusion of an NDA (among other clauses), so it seems very plausible that it was just removed entirely during that negotiation (aside from the one in the IP agreement).” Link here.
arthrowaway: “Also no non-disparagement clause in my agreement. FWIW I was one of the people who negotiated the severance stuff after the 2018 blowup, and I feel fairly confident that that holds for everyone. (But my memory is crappy, so that’s mostly because I trust the FB post about what was negotiated more than you do.)” From here (it’s in the same thread as the above)
Overall this tells a story where NDAs weren’t a big part of the Alameda story (since I think Ben West and nbouscal at least left during the 2018 blowup, but folks should correct me if I’m wrong). This is a bit interesting to me.
Interested in if others have different takeaways.
Buck, do you have any takes on how good this seems to you / how good the arguments in the manifesto for doing this work seem to you? (No worries if not or you don’t want to discuss publicly)
Also relevant: AI companies aren’t really using external evaluators
Clarifying METR’s Auditing Role [linkpost]
Say more about Conjecture’s structure?
I hear this; I don’t know if this is too convenient or something, but, given that you were already concerned at the prioritization 80K was putting on AI (and I don’t at all think you’re alone there), I hope there’s something more straightforward and clear about the situation as it lies now where people can opt-in or out of this particular prioritization or hearing the case for it.
Appreciate your work as a university organizer—thanks for the time and effort you dedicate to this (and also hello from a fellow UChicagoan, though many years ago).
Sorry I don’t have much in the way of other recommendations; I hope others will post them.