I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
huw
Karma: 2,673
I was never accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship programme, but I was able to land a high-impact role at one (now leading it!), by getting in touch with other founders. For me, this is no less rewarding than being the real founder, and enough people treat me as if I went through the programme that it’s usually a surprise to people that I didn’t.
So I would urge some people to reconsider if founding is exactly what you want, you may be able to derive almost all of the benefits via a slightly different path, and CE’s charities would very much welcome talented founder-type generalists in high-level leadership & ownership roles!
🔱 Please choose a slightly heavier weight for the font 🔱
We’ve started the process of creating a brand new codebase for the forum built on NextJS
I initially balked at rewrite syndrome, but thinking again, I think LLMs probably do really change the calculus of it. I like that you announced this by showing the proof of it in the new post page design!
A lot of modern training data isn’t stolen, though. There are organisations which recruit people to do their jobs normally and screen share, or provide worked-through examples of their work, and this is increasingly making up the bulk of the data that’s used to pull frontier models ahead of others on work benchmarks. People are being paid for this and do it willingly, usually with knowledge of where their labour outputs are going!
So really, the problem is a subset of workers in each field are ‘defecting’ (to use a rat term I kinda loathe). How do you create solidarity among groups of workers to prevent a small number of them from putting the others out of work? Or, if technological progress is to be necessary, how do those groups of workers politically agitate for a welfare state and good ongoing education?
The left solved this problem two hundred years ago, but I suspect EA won’t like the solution…
(Just contributing by adding that yeah, GiveDirectly’s fund works because Yemen is so dominantly muslim that the odds of going to a non-Muslim are basically nil). Even in Nigeria, the additional cost of trying to achieve Zakat compliance for a non-cash-or-in-kind-transfer charity may hamper expansion beyond the supermajority states enough to not be worth it. Unsure.
Always loved your work, but fully understand the decision. Thank you for it!
One thing which is unclear to me is, why aren’t these users counterfactually using free commercial offerings? Price is clearly not a barrier, is it just language? And why, then, wouldn’t a frontier lab be well-positioned to capture that market?
During the OpenAI board fiasco, we saw a large number of employees exert pressure on OpenAI to re-form under Sam Altman, suggesting labour power in AI labs is real and effective. Companies do have a hard time shutting themselves down for no reason, but have a much easier time scapegoating labour unions and strikes. And it’s relatively inexpensive to build a labour union, and easy to do when talent is scarce. Just sayin’
It would be quite funny for my intern to be the highest-paid person at my org if they keep that salary 😭
I’m not sure about whether this argument is reassuring even if you buy it. In economies with a lot of surplus labour, jobs certainly get filled, but we find menial things for people to do. Last time I was in India, there was a man employed to open the door for me at the bank so that I could use the ATM, in an example that feels particularly prescient. (There was a separate person standing next to him who was qualified to give directions, and a third who was a security guard—this man’s job was just to open the door for me).
I can imagine that this man feels like he is getting paid and can put food on the table, perhaps, but it is a stretch to imagine that his job gives him meaning, needed to happen, or had any point at all. Indeed, it is probably the case that a lot of India’s economic development has not occurred because of the vast amounts of surplus labour available—automatic doors do exist, after all.
India does not use genetically modified crops, for example, even though they have demonstrably higher yield. Why? Well, in one telling, GM crops would require less labour to tend to them, but they already have plenty of labour to slosh around. And you know what they say about idle hands…
A vast and rapid injection of surplus labour into the global economy is potentially very bad, but perhaps not in a way that is measurable in income or employment.
I think it’s worth noting that Larissa and Kerry have denied being involved with Leverage until after they departed CEA.
There is a thread here where Kerry (now deleted) makes claims on his side of this story.
I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble
This should be fairly realisable as a short on NVIDIA, may I ask why you’d prefer a bet?
The acceptable baseline amount of sexual harassment in a community that is otherwise steadfastly committed to rejecting the status quo and improving the state of the world, is zero. We are not comparing ourselves to the average workplace or university.
Alternatively, I have my 1:1s without a recording and then immediately debrief over voice to a transcriber afterward. Seems to bridge the best of both worlds.
For Australians and Singaporeans, you can order it from Vow, who I understand are one of the world’s largest cultivated meat producers. However, they mostly produce delicacy formats such as pâté and croquettes—steaks are probably a few years off, regardless of where you eat.
I hosted ~12 friends or so at my place for a vegetarian meal last year and offered the pâté and croquettes as starters. They were well received, essentially just perfect substitutes for the real thing.
Ex-DeepMind scientist David Silver has just raised a $5 billion valuation for his new startup, and pledged to donate 100% of the proceeds from his equity stake via Founders Pledge.
Are we prepared for the AI money to start hitting?
For Kalshi specifically, it seems to have essentially become a backdoor to deregulate sports gambling in every US state. The mass deregulation of gambling in the US this decade feels harmful and like something we’ll probably really regret (legalisation seems fine but not like this).
It doesn’t seem popular to criticise the gambling aspects of prediction markets here, but it does seem strange to me that EAs seem to care a lot about reducing harms from tobacco and alcohol, but seem indifferent to gambling.
Yes, sorry, I should be clear I am arguing for new tobacco legislation to be paired with stronger enforcement, and not for new tobacco legislation to be avoided.
Here’s the data from Australia:
(FMC: Factory Made Cigarettes; RYO: Roll Your Own)
Australia instituted a full vaping ban in 2024 to combat the rise in total nicotine use, which had been trending toward before 2020. It’s a little early to tell, but a similar rise in taxation for cigarettes seems to have really pumped up the illicit market because the price of illegal cigarettes inverted below the price of legal ones. Anecdotally, there are way more drugstores than before that are straight up selling illegal cigarettes, and enforcement has been lacking.
I think this kind of generational ban can be done, but governments need to strictly enforce and tamp down on the underground market. I don’t know what the right policies are here.
(Just realising I am developing an eye for AI-generated graphics now, to complement my eye for AI-generated text, images, and videos. There’s something so familiar about this style.)