SebastianSchmidt

Karma: 529

Impact Academy is a non-profit organization that enables people to become world-class leaders, thinkers, and doers who are using their careers and character to solve our most pressing problems and create the best possible future.

I also work as an impact-driven and truth-seeking coach for people who are trying to do the most good.

I’m also a medical doctor, author, and former visiting researcher (biosecurity) at Stanford.

I appreciate feedback—especially about how I’m falling short. Please do me a favor and leave https://www.admonymous.co/sebastian_schmidt

SebastianSchmidt 23 Sep 2024 20:02 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Henri Thunberg 🔸’s comment on: Giv Effektivt (DK) need ~110 more members to be able to offer tax deductions of around $66.000)
Thanks for this Ulrik. It’s a great initiative. +1 to Henri’s comment (I also signed up a while back).

SebastianSchmidt 13 Jul 2024 9:52 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Cooperative AI: Three things that confused me as a beginner (and my current understanding)
I don’t have anything intelligent to add to this, but I just wanted to say that I found the notion of AI psychologies and character traits fascinating, and I hope to ponder this further.

SebastianSchmidt 13 Jul 2024 9:50 UTC
3 points
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on: Cooperative AI: Three things that confused me as a beginner (and my current understanding)
Thanks so much for this blog post. As you know, I’ve been attempting to understand Cooperative AI a bit better over the past weeks.
More concretely, I found it helpful as a conceptual exploration of what Cooperative AI is. Including how it relates to other adjacent (sub)fields—including the diagram! I also appreciated you flagging the potential dual-use aspect of cooperative intelligence—especially given the fact that you’re working in this field and therefore be prone to wishful thinking.

That said, I would’ve appreciated if you covered a bit more about:
- Why Cooperative AI is important. I personally think Cooperative AI (at least as I currently understand it) is undervalued on the margin and that we need more focus on potential multi-agent scenarios and complex human interactions.
- What people in the field of Cooperative AI are actually doing—including how they navigate the dual-use considerations.

SebastianSchmidt 2 May 2024 12:02 UTC
1 point
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on: Launching applications for AI Safety Careers Course India 2024
I am honored to be part of enabling more people from around the world to contribute to the safe and responsible development of AI.

SebastianSchmidt 29 Apr 2024 17:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michael Noetel 🔸’s comment on: Australians are concerned about AI risks and expect strong government action
Very helpful. I’ll keep it in mind if the use case/need emerges in the future.

SebastianSchmidt 18 Apr 2024 20:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michael Noetel 🔸’s comment on: Australians are concerned about AI risks and expect strong government action
That makes sense. We might do some more strategic outreach later this year where a report like this would be relevant but for now i don’t have a clear use case in mind for this so probably better to wait. Approximately how much time would you need to run this?

SebastianSchmidt 11 Mar 2024 21:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michael Noetel 🔸’s comment on: Australians are concerned about AI risks and expect strong government action
Thanks. Hmm. The vibe I’m getting from these answers is P(extinction)>5% (which is higher than the XST you linked).

Ohh that’s great. We’re starting to do significant work in India and would be interested in knowing similar things there. Any idea of what it’d cost to run there?

SebastianSchmidt 8 Mar 2024 14:57 UTC
2 points
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on: Australians are concerned about AI risks and expect strong government action
Thanks for sharing. This is a very insightful piece. Im surprised that folks were more concerned about larger scale abstract risks compared to more well defined and smaller scale risks (like bias). I’m also surprised that they are this pro regulation (including a Sox months pause). Given this, I feel a bit confused that they mostly support the development of AI and I wonder what had most shaped their view.

Overall, I mildly worry that the survey led people to express more concern than they feel. Because this seems surprisingly close to my perception of the views of many existential risks “experts”. What do you think?

Would love to see this for other countries too. How feasible do you think that would be?

SebastianSchmidt 29 Jan 2024 11:50 UTC
4 points
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on: Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)
Thanks for writing this up and sharing. I strongly appreciate the external research evaluation initiative and was generally impressed with the apparent counterfactual impact.

SebastianSchmidt 25 Jan 2024 11:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ben Snodin’s comment on: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections
Thanks for your response Ben. All of these were on my radar but thanks for sharing.

Good luck with what you’ll be working on too!

SebastianSchmidt 5 Jan 2024 14:48 UTC
16 points
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on: Zach Robinson will be CEA’s next CEO
Congratulations! I’m looking forward to understanding the strategic direction you and CEA will pursue going forward. Do you have a sense of when you’d be able to share a version of these?

SebastianSchmidt 1 Jan 2024 17:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Inga’s comment on: Rethink Wellbeing: First Year Update & Marginal Funding Opportunity
2.
- How do you define guided self-help? Do you mean facilitated group sessions?
- Do you have any specific papers/references that you’ve used to for those estimates?

SebastianSchmidt 23 Dec 2023 11:31 UTC
1 point
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on: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections
Thanks for writing this up. We’re running an incubation pilot at Impact Academy and found this post very helpful as a reference class (for comparison in terms of success) as well as providing strategic clarity.
I’m curious, what were the best initiatives (inside and outside of EA) you came across in your search (e.g., y-combinator, charity entrepreneurship, etc.)?

SebastianSchmidt 19 Dec 2023 17:43 UTC
2 points
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on: Rethink Wellbeing: First Year Update & Marginal Funding Opportunity
Congratulations on running the pilot and getting these results!

They seem rather promising to me and above a threshold for testing more rigorously and scaling. However, a couple of questions:
1. When did you measure the end effects and are you planning on doing a follow-up?
2. How does this compare to interventions such as eight weeks therapy or coaching?

SebastianSchmidt 4 Dec 2023 9:55 UTC
4 points
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on: Taking Into Account Sentient Non-Humans in AI Ambitious Value Learning: Sentientist Coherent Extrapolated Volition
Congratulations! Very happy to see the fruit of your diligent effort.

SebastianSchmidt 11 Nov 2023 21:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: elteerkers’s comment on: Existential Hope and Existential Risk: Exploring the value of optimistic approaches to shaping the long-term future
Glad it was useful. Looking forward to seeing the course (fortunate that you had reached out to request feedback on it).

SebastianSchmidt 11 Nov 2023 17:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Great to see how concrete and serious the US is now. This basically means that models more powerful than GPT-4 have to be reported to the government.

SebastianSchmidt 4 Nov 2023 9:34 UTC
1 point
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on: Existential Hope and Existential Risk: Exploring the value of optimistic approaches to shaping the long-term future
Thanks for posting this!
I appreciate the overview and attempt to build conceptual clarity around this related cluster of ideas that you neatly refer to Very Positive Futures.

To respond to some of your prompts:
- What are your views on the potential pros and cons of more focus on VPF? With which points do you agree or disagree? What are other arguments?
  - I think you summarized the pros and cons quite well but I’m just emphasizing the most compelling from my perspective.
  - IMO, the strongest pros are i) increased clarity on prioritization, ii) motivation/psychology (anecdotally, Martin Luther King’s speech started with “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare” and similarly it seems that positive psychology has made some progress that the original dysfunction-oriented psychology didn’t), and iii) being able to attract a different crowd of people.
  - IMO, the strongest cons are i) risk of unconditional enthusiasm that might end up being a distraction from the very pressing risks and suffering.
- Which term resonates most with you: Existential Hope, Positive Trajectory Change, Utopia, or perhaps a similar term not described in the post?
  - I quite like Existential hope. Another term that resonates is “future vision”.
  - MacAskill briefly talks about procedural visions which I also quite like. Finally, I’d imagine that people within the EA space would also resonate quite a bit with “Existential Security”.
I think some interesting initiatives related to VPF are:
- FLI’s world-building contest.
- Karnofsky’s poll of 400 Americans’ responses to 16 different scenarios and 22 different traits of utopia.
Finally, I’d like to ask—if you had to design an introductory course that includes VPF, what are the key concepts, resources, or arguments you’d want to include?

SebastianSchmidt 31 Oct 2023 21:19 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: The UK AI Safety Summit tomorrow
You’re most welcome Geoffrey. Glad someone like yourself find it helpful.

SebastianSchmidt 29 Oct 2023 9:01 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Speech on AI
Having thought more about it, I think the AI safety institute might be a continuation of the UK Frontier AI Taskforce. I don’t know anything about the object-level output of the Taskforce but they’ve certainly managed to put together a great bunch of people as advisors and contributors (Yoshua Bengio, Paul Christiano, etc.). Very excited to see what comes out of this.