Dylan Patel of Semianalysis (one of the leading semiconductor research firms) did a good recent episode on the Bg2 podcast where he covers this question and others:
Rasool
Karma: 639
I agree with Greg that I’m not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:
Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health
(emphasis mine)
And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:
What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.
Well put! I will add that the competition includes companies like Amazon creating their own chips and others designing silicon specialised for inference (like Groq (not to be confused with xAI’s model Grok))
I got an email from the IDC yesterday saying that they received “over 130 submissions” which is far fewer than I expected.
People who made a submission based on this post are a meaningful portion of all those who engaged with this process!
You might find this post interesting, which covered this and 3 other similar recent economics papers
Matthew Yglesias wrote a Giving Tuesday piece about GiveDirectly that makes a compelling case for effective giving to a general audience. The article addresses why one should consider directing charity to the Global South, what makes cash transfers an appealing intervention, and how this approach can be reconciled with the desire to volunteer locally.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-help-the-poorest-people-in
My first reaction is that working on AI safety directly is more specialised and niche, so it might be your comparative advantage, while the 80k one might be filled by candidates from a wider range of backgrounds
I downvoted. This post would be better if it was a clearer explanation of what the organisation does, its theory of change, impact and cost-effectiveness, and only a brief description of the job opening
Plus it seems like there are a bunch of employees on the website already
GiveWell publish a lot of information from their board meetings, including previously full audio recordings
Impactful Government Careers for community and support in and around the Civil Service
There’s some of that in these posts:
https://lynettebye.com/blog/2024/5/2/how-to-make-hard-decisions-and-have-impact
Though it’s more focussed on generating ideas and testing them
I also don’t feel comfortable claiming this as a Gift Aid eligible ‘donation’
I can’t remember the wording on the registration page, but I think it was phrased around purchasing a ticket, rather than making a donation
And as you said, there wasn’t any mention of Gift Aid declarations (regardless of whether CEA was going to do anything with that)
Even the confirmation email I got said ‘Date of purchase’ (rather than ‘Date of donation’ or similar)
While it is true that you could have gotten a free ticket meaning that there was no extra benefit in paying (pointed out by domdomegg here)
I’m not sure how it works given that there was an application process and your application could be rejected
More importantly, HMRC seem to be wise to the idea of treating all ticket purchases as donations, in 3.43.6 here it states:
A charity can charge what it likes for a ticket to attend its event. However, it should not put the charity’s funds at risk and, therefore, should set the ticket price at a level to at least recover its costs.And I’m pretty sure the wording on the registration page was something like “£400 lets us recoup the cost from running the event” or similar.
So I don’t think HMRC would see these payments as ‘monies received as fundraising during an event that the charity put on’ rather than ‘ticket price for an event’ (which is not an eligible donation)
Is there much administrative overhead to claim Gift Aid?
If 500(?) people are paying £400 (for a total of £200,000), you can claim £50,000 from the government which seems like it should be worthwhile
And it’s not too late to collect people’s Gift Aid declarations (section 3.6.3 here)
I’m disturbed by a couple of things in this thread:
@OllieBase is giving very confident tax advice, which I’m not sure is correct
It seems to be contradicted by a later email exchange between the EAG team and Lovkush
In that email exchange, it turns out that we could choose the free ticket and then separately make a tax-deductible donation to CEA through GWWC
Why isn’t this more publicised? Every UK tax payer would benefit from this (or CEA themselves would benefit by being able to claim 25% extra)
Swapcard tips:
The mobile browser is more reliable than the app
You can use Firefox/Safari/Chrome etc. on your phone, go to swapcard.com and use that instead of downloading the Swapcard app from your app store. As far as I know, the only thing the app has that the mobile site does not, is the QR code that you need when signing in when you first get to the venue and pick up your badge
Only what you put in the ‘Biography’ section in the ‘About Me’ section of your profile is searchable when searching in Swapcard
The other fields, like ‘How can I help others’ and ‘How can others help me’ appear when you view someone’s profile, but will not be used when searching using Swapcard search. This is another reason to use the Swapcard Attendee Google sheet that is linked-to in Swapcard to search
You can use a (local!) LLM to find people to connect with
People might not want their data uploaded to a commercial large language model, but if you can run an open-source LLM locally, you can upload the Attendee Google sheet and use it to help you find useful contacts
You might want to reach out to the author of this post to see if they got anywhere with their research
I can only echo what I said on that post, Energise Africa lets you invest in bonds, it used to be just for solar panels but they’ve expanded recently to other things like electric forklifts
You can invest via your ISA too
The platform itself I think is stable and reliable, though the companies themselves do occasionally go under—I think rising interest rates over the past couple of years hit some of these companies hard. When I have time later I’ll go through my portfolio and share the performance of my investments
I can see a bunch of EA orgs (and others) have used these folks:
In the UK at least, they are especially desperate for donors who are male and/or from an ethnic minority background
https://www.anthonynolan.org/help-save-a-life/join-stem-cell-register
Some others here: https://tomweinresearch.me/job-boards/
Re: Possible investment strategies there is a dialogue on LessWrong from November 2023 which I think still holds up. Quoting from the takeaways:
About energy companies, I think the investment idea is less about general global energy consumption via AI, but rather the companies that are helping to build out and power these large data centres.
Microsoft have been investing in nuclear energy, xAI’s Colossus cluster was positioned right next to a natural gas plant, Sam Altman invested in and is now chair of the board of nuclear startup Oklo. And my understanding is that power substation equipment is a bottleneck with equipment like transformers now having a lead time of years