MichaelDickens's Shortform

MichaelDickens

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I get the sense that we can't trust Open Philanthropy to do a good job on AI safety, and this is a big problem. Many people would have more useful things to say about this than I do, but I still feel that I should say something.

My sense comes from:

Open Phil is reluctant to do anything to stop the companies that are doing very bad things to accelerate the likely extinction of humanity, and is reluctant to fund anyone who's trying to do anything about it.
People at Open Phil have connections with people at Anthropic, a company that's accelerating AGI and has a track record of (plausibly-deniable) dishonesty. Dustin Moskovitz has money invested in Anthropic, and Open Phil employees might also stand to make money from accelerating AGI. And I agree with Bryan Caplan's recent take that friendships are often a bigger conflict of interest than money, so Open Phil higher-ups being friends with Anthropic higher-ups is troubling.

A lot of people (including me as of ~one year ago) consider Open Phil the gold standard for EA-style analysis. I think Open Phil is actually quite untrustworthy on AI safety (but probably still good on other causes).

I don't know what to do with this information.

I expect that when we look back in a few years, there will be a pretty strong feeling that this was the wrong call & that this should've been more apparent even without the benefit of hindsight.

Prescient.

1Czynski2y

Things can be done to encourage this behavior anway, such as with how the site works. Instead the opposite has been done; this is the root of my many heated disagreements with the LW team.

2Chris Lakin2y

fwiw, FABRIC was able to get funding in November 2024 (who knows if this date is correct though) nvm this was an "exit grant" lmao