Jeffrey Heninger

Introduction Frontier AI companies have seen rapid increases in the economic resources they have available to pursue AI progress. At some companies, the number of employees is at least doubling every year, and the amount of capital received is tripling every year. It is unclear whether this growth is sustainable....

Epistemic status: Low-effort post about something I am very familiar with. Preamble Scott Alexander recently wrote about making strong communities within a liberal society. He has nice things to say about Mormons: > Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mormons: Get lots of people of the same religion together in one place -...

Racing Towards a New Technology Is a Collective Choice, Not an Inevitable Consequence of Incentives Before I started thinking about AI policy, I was working in the trying-to-get-fusion industry. There are some significant similarities between AI and fusion. * Both are emerging technologies. * Both have the potential to have...

The 60+ Year Gap AI Impacts has run three surveys (2016, 2022, & 2023) asking AI researchers about how they expect AI to develop in the future.[1] One of the key questions addressed was when AI capabilities will exceed human capabilities. The surveys did not ask directly about 'Artificial General...

Epistemic Status: I wrote this back in January, and have been uncertain about whether to publish it. I expect that most people who read this here will be unconvinced. But I still want to express my intuition. In the last month, these ideas have come up in conversation again. Then,...

by J. Bradford de Long and Andrei Shleifer. (1993) https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/princes_merchants.pdf. Summary: Freer societies have faster economic growth. > One of the oldest themes in economics is the incompatibility of despotism and development. Economies in which security of property is lacking – because of either the possibility of arrest, ruin, or...

by Anne Marthe van der Bles, Sander van der Linden, Alexandra L. J. Freeman, and David J. Spiegelhalter. (2020) https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1913678117. Summary: Numerically expressing uncertainty when talking to the public is fine. It causes people to be less confident in the number itself (as it should), but does not cause people...