Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
John Salter
Karma: 2,013
If you use LLMs for coding, you should probably at least try the free trial for cursor—it lives inside your IDE and can thus read and write directly to yours files. It’s a also an agent, meaning you can tell it to iterate a prompt over a list of files and it can do that for 10 minutes. It also lets you revert your code back to how it was at a different point in your chat history (although, you should still use git as the system isn’t perfect and if you aren’t careful it can simultaneously break and obsfuscate your code)
It will feel like magic, and it’s astonishingly good at getting something working, however it will make horrible long-term decisions. You thus have to make the architectural decisions yourself, but most of the code-gen can be done by the AI.It’s helpful if you’re not really sure what you want yet, and want to speedily design on the fly while instantly seeing how changes made affect the result (acknowledging that you’ll have to start again, or refactor heavilly, if you want to use it longer term or at scale)
The far future, on our current trajectory, seems net negative on average. Reducing extinction risk just multiplies its negative EV.
Updating your website feels extremely low urgency as a charity founder. Often you’re facing existential threats, deadlines for funding applications, operational issues that can literally be the difference between life and death, and a million other pressing issues you know you’ll never get round to because of the aforementioned.
I’m firmly on the side of sharing a draft.
YC aims at making VCs money; the Charity Entrepreneurship programme focuses on helping poor people and animals
I think both are trying to create value at scale. YC cares about what percentage of that value they’re able to capture. AIM doesn’t. I suspect one ought, by default, assume a large overlap between the two.
I don’t think the best ideas for helping poor people and animals are as likely to involve generative content creation as the best ideas for developed world B2B services and consumer products
As every charity listed is focused on human wellbeing, let’s focus on that. I think access to generative AI is better placed to help poorer people than it is to help richer people—it produces lower quality outputs than otherwise available to rich people, but dramatically better than those accessible to poor people. For example, the poorest can’t afford medical advice while the rich get doctors appointments the same week.
The EA ecosystem isn’t exactly as optimistic about the impact of developing LLM agents as VCs either..
It think the type of agent matters. It’s unclear how a chatGPT wrapper aimed at giving good advice to subsistence farmers, for example, would pose an existential threat to humanity
The more I think about it, the more I suspect the gap is actually more to do with the type of person running / applying to each organisation, than the relative merit of the ideas.
I’m surprised to see no ideas that incorporate AI. Y-Combinator, the for-profit equivalent of AIM, is now ~75% AI startups. If AIM has looked into relevant ideas, I’d be curious to know what deterred them.
Bit the bullet and paid them $200. So far, it’s astonishingly good. If you’re in the UK/EU, you can get a refund no questions asked within 14 days so if you’re on the fence I’d definitely suggest giving it a go
ChatGPT deep-research users: What type of stuff does it perform well on? How good is it overall?
In the UK, it seems as though if you form an independent school, you get a ton of leeway about what you teach and how. If it could fund itself, it could be a really cost-effective experiment with big implications if it’s better and others adopt it.
You probably need:
1. A few rich early-adopters who’re die hard haters of traditional schooling, all concentrated in a single location, ideally with children around the same age.
2. An inexpensive school building to start with. Perhaps an office near a large park.
3. A model that lets you be the sole teacher, and insurance for a cover teacher if you fall ill.
4. A mentor who’s started an independent school before
5. A large loan / grant from an UHNWI. You likely have little hope at getting a grant from a foundation so it’s probably not worth trying (if the education sector is anything like the rest of the charity sector)It’s likely that starting a full school right away is completely hopeless. You probably need a series of intermediate steps to move you in that direction slowly. For example, if you homeschooled for rich parents, that’d let you build a network of rich parents while testing / refining your ideas.
For now, I suspect you’d be better off asking for advice from domain experts than EAs. If you’re serious about this, you might want to meet with the author and try to sell them on promoting your school. I suspect marketing would be your biggest issue by far, at least for the first few years.
Two questions I imagine prospective funders would have:
Can you give some indication as to the value of stripends? It’s not clear how the benefits trade off against that cost. It’s tempting to think that stripends are responsible for >80% of the costs but bring <20% of the benefit.
What would your attendees have been doing otherwise?
It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?
Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA’s approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.
I’d be keen to get more diversity of thought in general, including conservatives! I think self-funding charities / impact-orientated for-profits are neglected, especially in donor funding constrained areas.
It’s great how transparent you are with your reasoning and how clearly you expressed it
Some have argued that saving lives in developing countries does not actually raise the size of the population because people have less children when they feel more of them will likely survive or due to some other mechanism.
This would refute the central point of your case if true. What are your thoughts?
With respect to other causes areas:
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Animal advocates seem to spend a lot of energy engaging in mutually destructive conflict with one and other.
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Even accounting for the above, mental health seems unusually poor and willingness to use existing services is low
How open are you to funding related interventions?
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I’ve forwarded a few people towards community health and feedback has been universally good.
What could EA do better to help earn-to-givers maximise their impact?
Which donations do you think had the highest EV in retrospect?
You and Jeff could’ve easily scaled back your donations when your income decreased—no one would’ve questioned it, and it would’ve made total sense. But instead, you stuck with giving half. The only logical explanation is extreme selflessness! It’s really inspiring to see. Thank you for writing this post :)
Vikram Patel and Shekhar Saxena are pretty prolific researchers in this space too. Both are relatively easy to contact—I reached out to both and both got back to me pretty quickly
It’d be hard to do without breaking a lot of good heuristics (i.e. don’t lie, don’t kill people)