Coach & AI Safety Field Builder, currently working on aisafety.berlin and exploring a match-making service idea (early stage, not yet public)
Formerly director of EA Germany, EA Berlin and EAGxBerlin 2022
Happy to connect with people with shared interests. Message me with ideas, proposals, feedback, connections or just random thoughts!
PS: If you can share, I’d be curious to hear where this new retreat center will be located and when it will open. I imagine quite a few readers here might be curious about Tantra as well. Is there a way to sign up to be notified when you guys launch?
No worries if you cannot or don’t want to share more yet.
Well done, congrats to you for unlocking so much additional funding for effective charities and to the other stakeholders for being open to new ideas.
For anyone else trying to bridge world views, I’d like to add that it might be easier to pitch an EA-adjacent project first. GiveWell, GWWC or Founders Pledge (for entrepreneurs) is easier to pitch than EA, and for non-English speakers effective charity fundraisers such as Effektiv Spenden (German) might be easier to pitch.
Re “expected value”, I agree that it might sound less antagonistic / arrogant, but even fewer people would have any idea what this is about, and while it may appeal to some (nerdy) people more, I think more people would find it less appealing. Open to be convinced otherwise.
FYI: There has been extensive discussion on renaming EA before, quite a few people don’t think the current name is ideal, but no-one else found a more convincing name either, so at this point it seems very unlikely to me that EA will be renamed.
Depends, if x-risk is small (<5%) and if we expect outsized impact on the future (preventing negative value lock-ins), then the latter seems more important. I’m very unsure about both.
To give one example, I don’t see anything in the US comparable to how the Chinese government treats Uyghurs.
2025 updates on coworking spaces:
Constellation has a website, and a visiting fellows program. Short term visitors can email them: https://www.constellation.org/
FAR Labs, another AI safety coworking space in Berkeley, is open for short-term visiters and long-term memberships, see the application form on their website.
Lighthaven hosts programs such as MATS and various events.
Lightcone closed afaik?
What’s the status of this? I sometimes run into Brussel-based people interested in AI safety (technical, governance, …), is there any website or contact person for AI Safety Brussels that I could refer people to? If not, does EA Brussels have any members working in AI safety / governance?
This is the best summary of recent developments I’ve seen so far, thanks a lot for writing this up!
I’ve shared it with people in my AI Safety / AI Gov network, and we might discuss it in our AI Gov meetup tonight.
I did not say that this was due to the EU AI Act, agree that GDPR seems more likely. I mentioned it as an example of EU regulation leading to an AI Lab delaying their EU launch / deprioritizing the EU.
Anthropic released Claude everywhere but the EU first, and their EU release happened only months later, so to some extend labs are already deprioritizing the EU market. I guess this trend would continue? Not sure.
When will you be able to share first results? Any timeline?
These results seem more valuable the sooner you can share them, 3-6 months from now they’ll already be partially outdated and many orgs will have their annual strategies finalized, so if you can, the sooner the better. If you have limited capacity, I would also find it helpful to only see the results that are easy to share, such as number of EAs per country or career stage.
Thank you for doing this!
FYI: Their website is www.overcome.org.uk
(Sharing it as I had a bit of trouble finding it, it’s not linked in the post and not super easy to Google as there are other therapy services have the same name. I derived it from the email you linked.)
This seems valuable and cost-effective, I hope you reached your funding goals!
Fwiw, I’m glad we got our own forum and not just a subreddit or Twitter community, where the algorithms would optimize for engagement and do things like push controversial content instead of pushing things that actually seems most relevant for people’s ability to do the most good. Many thanks for building and maintaining this! <3
I’ve been in touch with some of the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) co-founders and the DACH director, and my sense is that all of them are very collaborative and interested in EA or even members of the community. I think SMA and EA have quite a lot of synergies, if they keep in touch with each other and don’t see each other as competition.
I see SMA as a unique chance to reach more people and more senior professionals, and get them excited about doing the most good. They might also be able to unlock additional funding for effective charities. I’m very excited to see them grow.
I read the Dutch version earlier last year and really enjoyed it! Interesting stories (e.g. how Ralph Nader established car safety) and fun to read. Reminded me of What We Owe The Future in some ways.
AIM (Charity Entrepreneurship) gets an entire chapter, and is the main EA org he writes about.
Curious that 80k is hardly mentioned at all. I wonder if that’s a conscious choice because he did not want to recommend 80k, or it simply did not fit in his story. Maybe Rutger resonates more with neartermist EA and therefore left out longtermist orgs like 80k. The cause areas the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) prioritzed so far in their fellowship were also more neartermist: alternative protein & tobacco control.
@Benjamin_Todd recently made a similar argument for why existing capital might matter even more post-AGI, sharing this here for anyone who’d like more context:
“AGI probably causes wages to increase initially, but eventually they collapse. Once AI models can deploy energy and other capital more efficiently to do useful things, there’s no reason to employ most humans any more. [...]”
Veritasium also sometimes does EA-related content, like his video on Oppenheimer or other scientists who had outsized impact on the world (both positive and negative)
Thanks for the transparency! This is really helpful for coordination.
For anyone interested in what 80k is deprioritizing, this comment section might be a good space to pitch other EA career support ideas and offer support.
There might be space for an organization specifically focussed in high school graduates to help them decide whether, where and what to study. This might be the most important decision in one’s life, especially for people like me who grew up on the countryside without really any intellectual role models and are open to moving abroad for their studies.
I’m unlikely to prioritize this any time soon, but if anyone else wants to set something up, I might be able to advice and maybe help fundraise, support etc, just message or email me (contact on linktr.ee/manuelallgaier)