I am a lawyer and policy researcher interested in improving the governance of artificial intelligence. I currently work as Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI. I previously worked in various legal and policy roles at OpenAI.
I am also a Research Affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI and a VP at the OâKeefe Family Foundation.
My research focuses on the law, policy, and governance of advanced artificial intelligence.
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How are you defining âpowerlessâ? See my previous comment: I think the common meaning of âpowerlessâ implies not just significant constraints on power but rather the complete absence thereof.
I would say that the LTBT is powerless iff it can be trivially prevented from accomplishing its primary functionâoverriding the financial interests of the for-profit Anthropic investorsâby those investors, such as with a simple majority (which is the normal standard of corporate control). I think this is very unlikely to be true, p<5%.
I definitely would not say that the OpenAI Board was powerless to remove Sam in general, for the exact reason you say: they had the formal power to do so, but it was politically constrained. That formal power is real and, unless it can be trivially overruled in any instance in which it is exercised for the purpose for which it exists, sufficient to not be âpowerless.â
It turns out that they were maybe powerless to remove him in that instance and in that way, but I think there are many nearby fact patterns on which the Sam firing could have worked. This is evident from the fact that, in the period of days after November 17, prediction markets gave much less than 90% oddsâand for many periods of time much less than 50%âthat Sam would shortly come back as CEO.
As an intuition pump: Would we say that the President is powerless just because the other branches of government can constrain her (e.g., through the impeachment power or ability to override her veto) in many cases? I think not.
âPowerlessâ under its normal meaning is a very high bar, meaning completely lacking power. Taking all of Anthropicâs statements as true, I think we have evidence that the LTBT has significant powers (the ability to appoint an increasing number of board members), with unclear but significant legal and (an escalating supermajority requirement) and political constraints on those powers. I think itâs good to push for both more transparency on what those constraints are and for more independence. But unless a simple majority of shareholders are able to override the LTBTâwhich seems to be ruled out by the evidenceâI would not describe them as powerless.
I think âpowerlessâ is a huge overstatement of the claims you make in this piece (many of which I agree with). Having powers that are legally and politically constrained is not the same thing as the nonexistence of those powers.
I agree though that additional information about the Trust and its relationship to Anthropic would be very valuable.
I am not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI.
It is important to me that people know this, so that they can trust any future policy analysis or opinions I offer.
I have no further comments at this time.
Iâm sorry for not getting around to responding to this, and may not be able to for some time. But I wanted to quickly let you know that I appreciated both this comment and your post, and both updated me significantly toward your position and away from my Reason 4.
Do you have specific examples of proposals you think have been too far outside the window?
I realize that the idea of cloud labs is not new. I just think that this particular quote is so obviously scary that it could be rhetorically useful.
Quote from VC Josh Wolfe:
Biology. We will see an AWS moment where instead of you having to be a biotech firm that opens your own wet lab or moves into Alexandria Real Estate, which is you know, specializes in hosting biotech companies, in in all these different regions approximate to academic research centers. You will be able to just take your experiment and upload it to the cloud where there are cloud-based robotic labs. We funded some of these. Thereâs one company called Stratios.
Thereâs a ton that are gonna come on wave, and this is exciting because you can be a scientist on the beach in the Bahamas, pull up your iPad, run an experiment. The robots are performing 90% of the activity of Pouring something from a beaker into another, running a centrifuge, and then the data that comes off of that.
And this is the really cool part. Then the robot and the machines will actually say to you, âHey, do you want to run this experiment but change these 4 parameters or these variables?â And you just click a button âyesâ as though itâs reverse prompting you, and then you run another experiment. So the implication here is that the boost in productivity for science, for generation of truth, of new information, of new knowledge, That to me is the most exciting thing. And the companies that capture that, forget about the societal dividend, I think are gonna make a lot of money.
I made a perma.cc copy of the Final Report here: https://ââperma.cc/ââ3KP9-ZSFB
OP gave some reasoning for their views on their recent blog post:
Another place where I have changed my mind over time is the grant we gave for the purchase of Wytham Abbey, an event space in Oxford.
We initially agreed to help fund that purchase as part of our effort to support the growth of the community working to reduce global catastrophic risks (GCRs). The original idea presented to us was that the space could serve as a hub for workshops, retreats, and conferences, to cut down on the financial and logistical costs of hosting large events at private facilities. This was pitched to us at a time when FTX was making huge commitments to the GCR community, which made resources appear more abundant and lowered our own bar. Since its purchase, the space has gotten meaningful use for community events and gatherings. But with the collapse of FTX, our bar for this kind of work rose, and the original grant would no longer have risen to the level where we would want to provide funding.
Because this was a large asset, we agreed with Effective Ventures ahead of time that we would ask them to sell the Abbey if the event space, all things considered, turned out not to be sufficiently cost-effective. We recently made that request; funds from the sale will be distributed to other valuable projects they run.
While this grant retroactively came in below our new bar, I donât think that alone is a big problem. If you didnât make some grants that look less attractive when the expected funding drops by half, you werenât spending aggressively enough before.
But I still think I personally made a mistake in not objecting to this grant back when the initial decision was made and I was co-CEO. My assessment then was that this wasnât a major risk to Open Philanthropy institutionally, so it wasnât my place to try to stop it. I missed how something that could be parodied as an âeffective altruist castleâ would become a symbol of EA hypocrisy and self-servingness, causing reputational harm to many people and organizations who had nothing to do with the decision or the building.
This is a tough balance to strike because I think itâs easy for organizations to be paralyzed by concerns over reputational risk, rendering them unable to make nearly any decisions. And I think a core part of our hits-based giving philosophy is being able to make major bets that can fail outright, even in embarrassing ways. I want to maintain that openness to risk when the upside justifies it. But this example has made me want to raise our bar for things that could end up looking profligate or irresponsible to the detriment of broader communities weâre associated with.
How does AMF collect feedback from the end-recipients of bednets? How does feedback from them inform AMFâs programming?
Do you have any citations for this claim?
According to the book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, some early Christians sold themselves into slavery so they could donate the proceeds to the poor. Super interesting example of extreme and early ETG.
(Iâm listening on audiobook so I donât have the precise page for this claim.)
(To avoid bad-faith misinterpretation: I obviously think that nobody should do the same.)
Longtermist shower thought: what if we had a campaign to install Far-UVC in poultry farms? Seems like it could:
Reduce a bunch of diseases in the birds, which is good for: a. the birdsâ welfare; b. the workersâ welfare; c. Therefore maybe the farmersâ bottom line?; d. Preventing/âsuppressing human pandemics (eg avian flu)
Would hopefully drive down the cost curve of Far-UVC
May also generate safety data in chickens, which could be helpful for derisking it for humans
Insofar as one of the main obstacles is humansâ concerns for health effects, this would at least only raise these for a small group of workers.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
How probable does he think it is that some UAP observed on Earth are aliens? :-)
Super excited about the artificial conscience paper. Iâd note that a similar approach be very useful for creating law-following AIs:
An LFAI system does not need to store all knowledge regarding the set of laws that it is trained to follow. More likely, the practical way to create such a system would be to make the system capable of recognizing when it faces sufficient legal uncertainty,[10] then seeking evaluation from a legal expert system (âCounselorâ).[11]
The Counselor could be a human lawyer, but in the long-run is probably most robust and efficient if (at least partially) automated. The Counselor would then render advice on the pure basis of idealized legality: the probability and expected legal downsides that would result from an idealized legal dispute regarding the action if everyone knew all the relevant facts.
I agree this would be appealing to intellectually consistent conservatives, but this seems like a bad meme to be spreading/âstrengthening for animal welfare. Maybe local activists should feel free to deploy it if they think they can flip some conservativeâs position, but they will be setting themselves up for charges of hypocrisy if they later want to e.g. ban eggs from caged chickens.