gergo

• gergoMay 8, 2025, 8:29 AM

  23 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Gover­nance)

  Disclaimer: I have a friend working at CAIP.
  
  It’s incredibly sad to hear CAIP might needs to shut down. They are one of the very few adults in the room in Washington. If their team doesn’t meet the bar of funders, I don’t know who else should.

  (Of course, it’s more complicated than that, see LeahC’s comment).

• gergoMay 6, 2025, 10:59 AM

  6 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: EA Funds’ Grant­mak­ing Pause runs 1 June − 31 July, Ap­ply by 9 May

  Thanks for the heads up! I would add the dates to the title, as my first impression was that this is an immediate pause or smth.

• gergoMay 1, 2025, 11:01 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Crowd-sourc­ing AI workflows

  Can I ask what app you are using for recording speech? :)

• gergoMay 1, 2025, 10:57 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Ger­many’s Strat­egy for 2025

  Thanks for sharing!

  We will continue to support community builders individually in 1-1s as needed, as trust has been established already. As CEA offers the Organiser Support Programme (OSP) …

  Isn’t OSP limited to university groups?

Fund­ing and job op­por­tu­ni­ties, events, and thoughts on pro­fes­sion­als (Field­builders newslet­ter #8)

• gergoApr 23, 2025, 8:42 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: gergo’s comment on: Rogue Im­pact: A pro­ject-based agency for EA tal­ent-in-waiting

  Also: If your project also applies to AI Safety, I would flag that in the title, as there are many people in AIS who are not associated with EA

• gergoApr 23, 2025, 8:41 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Rogue Im­pact: A pro­ject-based agency for EA tal­ent-in-waiting

  Exciting project! IQuick recommendations:

  • Putting out a short form where people can get in touch with you and share their basic information (in my experience, it’s actually lower friction than sending a DM),

  • Sharing a bit more on what you expect from volunteers in terms of time commitment

  • Having an internal/​external directory where people can sign up with some proof that they have gotten far in some hiring rounds

  • Reaching out to various directories. In their internal systems, they often flag people who made it far in hiring rounds. Same with hiring managers for orgs.

• gergoApr 18, 2025, 1:27 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Denis ’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  Thanks for sharing!

  One of my first interviewers did a 1-hour interview, after which he (rightly) did not continue the process. He explained very clearly why and what skills I was missing. He also set up an additional call where he talked through how my skill-set might be most valuable within an impactful role, and some ideas. He gave me lots of connections to people he knew. And so on. And he offered to help if I needed help.

  This is great practice; however, I believe it happens only in a minority of cases. Typically, people who are filtered out early receive an email stating they can’t receive individual feedback. Given this, I recommend that if someone makes it far enough to be invited to an interview, ask for feedback at the end of the meeting before concluding. It’s better than sending an email after a decision has been made.

  Alternatively, if you encounter the hiring manager at a conference, consider reaching out. However, if the interview was some time ago, don’t expect them to remember, as they’ve likely conducted hundreds since then.

• gergoApr 18, 2025, 9:58 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Peter Drotos 🔸’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  I mostly felt the lack of context limiting in the early days when I was actually trying to gain more context.

  Strongly agree, once you “have your foot in the door” its much easier to get additional context as you know where to look for it.
  
  Thanks for sharing your experience!

• gergoApr 15, 2025, 12:57 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_Kristoffersson’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  Thanks for expanding! I appreciate the distinction between “language” and “concepts” as well as your thoughts on using language for in-group signaling and too much in-group hiring.

• gergoApr 14, 2025, 11:16 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_Kristoffersson’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  To follow up on this:

  it’s not important to me that people know a lot about in-group language, people, or events around AI safety

  I can see that people and events are less important, but as far as concepts go, I presume it would be important for them to know at least some of the terms, such as x/​s risk, moral patienthood, recursive self-improvement, take-off speed, etc.
  
  As far as I know, really none of these are widely known outside of the AIS community, or do you mean something else by in-group language?

• gergoApr 11, 2025, 8:57 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Eva Lu’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  Ah, right. x) Thanks so much for pointing this out!

• gergoApr 11, 2025, 8:56 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  Yeah I agree about this case, I will actually take it out!

• gergoApr 11, 2025, 8:55 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_Kristoffersson’s comment on: Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

  Thanks for sharing this, David!

Why ex­pe­rienced pro­fes­sion­als fail to land high-im­pact roles (FBB #5)

• gergoApr 9, 2025, 12:58 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Martin (Huge) Vlach’s comment on: Why *not* just send peo­ple to Blue­dot (FBB#4)

  thanks for flagging, I fixed it now!

• gergoApr 7, 2025, 3:49 PM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Why *not* just send peo­ple to Blue­dot (FBB#4)

  Sorry for the late reply, Vasco. Thanks for your comment! I echo some of Chris’s points, but wanted to add some scattered thoughts:

  I think the cost-effectiveness of AIS groups vs Bluedot would definitely depend on a given group, as I expect there to be large differences between different groups. The best ones might be more cost-effective than Bluedot, but I doubt anyone looked at this very rigorously (this analysis is great, but doesn’t include a Bluedot-like program). If you have the money, you likely want to fund both even if one is slightly better than the other.

  The volunteer-run initiatives are likely more cost-effective kind of by default (though see next point).

  Another consideration is a tradeoff between impact and cost-effectiveness. E.g if Bluedot is not funding constrained, then it might make sense for them to optimize for the largest impact, even if that comes with the price of slightly decreased cost-effectiveness. An example of this could be diminishing returns on spending money on LinkedIn ads. This could mean that the marginal impact of money donated to them is smaller, but funders still might prefer this to having to spend time on evaluating 10 AIS groups due to time costs)

• gergoApr 3, 2025, 7:44 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Short Timelines Strat­egy for AI Safety Univer­sity Groups

  Great post, thanks for sharing!

• gergoApr 2, 2025, 10:08 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AI Mo­ral Align­ment: The Most Im­por­tant Goal of Our Generation

  Furthermore, it is probably a non-sum zero game, and more efforts on MA might not come at the expense of AI safety money.

  Agreed. As far as I know, Polaris Ventures is interested in the s-risk space but not fund more “traditional” AI Safety work.

• gergoApr 2, 2025, 9:47 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Egg Syntax’s comment on: Why *not* just send peo­ple to Blue­dot (FBB#4)

  Hey Egg, thanks for your comment! Here are my thoughts:

  but far more often than that I point new people to the BlueDot curriculum. I commonly see others doing the same; I think it’s become the default AIS 101 reading. Maybe you’re mistaking that for people pushing the BlueDot course on everyone new to the field?

  This totally makes sense, I do the same, though I think if people have the opportunity to take a “live” course that is more beneficial. What this post aims to respond to is the notion that, given that Bluedot exists as an organisation, people conclude that there is no need to start local fieldbuilding initiatives (something I come across quite often). Hope that clarifies!

  AI safety (other than governance) isn’t at all a local problem, and so there’s no particular reason to focus on local groups.

  Agreed! However, looking at the many benefits that such initiatives provide (some of which you mentioned, and the others I outline in the post) I think it is justified to run them.

  [on AIS being management constrained] That’s not obvious to me; I do think there are constraints there but my sense is that the field is currently mainly bottlenecked by funding (1, 2)

  I could concede that the main bottleneck is funding right now. My current guess on funding gaps is that up until now, it was possible to get a small “moonshot” grant from LTFF relatively easily (this might change now that they pivoted to doing funding rounds), but then projects will fail to maintain funding once they need over 100k USD. For orgs that can fundraise from OP, money is less of an issue.

  Why are they more likely to give AIS the benefit of the doubt? Won’t that be most likely to happen if their exposure is to the highest-quality course they have access to?

  What I mean here is that if you are introduced to a local AIS community through a friend who is also part of that group, you are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt even if the course is not run as professionally as Bluedot’s. Compared to such a person, I expect it’s better for an experienced professional to take Bluedot’s course instead of one organised by university students or fresh graduates. The quality of materials is important in either case!