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Open Thread 445

This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:


1: Correction on the last links post: the shingles vaccine - decreased dementia connection failed to replicate in Britain and is now on thin ice. Thanks to Alex for pointing this out.

2: Resolution is a very new AI safety organization working on combining automated alignment research with deep theoretical understanding. They argue that this work requires a big organization with lots of compute, and seem on track to getting it - they recently raised $160 million from Coefficient Giving and are scaling up fast. They ask me to advertise that they’re looking for a COO / operational co-founder, who will:

...work side-by-side with Geoffrey Irving on organisational strategy: how to prioritise hiring? How to allocate capital across a portfolio of research bets? How to sustain a culture of celebrating negative research results? They’ll also lead execution, raising the next OOM of funding, building stronger partnerships with frontier companies, and making their internal systems a fantastic user experience for staff. In their first couple of months, Resolution have raised $160M, merged with Timaeus, secured office space, and are approaching 30 staff. If you’ve done things like lead a startup from pre-seed to series C, scale a research nonprofit from 20→200, or run operations at a frontier lab, please reach out to holnesstofts [at] resolution.org.

For other open roles at Resolution, see here.

3: Updates on AI hacking and Hugging Face (trying not to have to make another post): Anthropic says their AI also did some hacking (they say the AI thought the whole thing was in a simulation, although some commentators are skeptical). And Peter Wildeford, Antonio Max, and Samuel Hammond share their opinions on the ‘Pacing The Frontier’ letter.

4: Compassion Aligned Machine Learning asks me to signal-boost their survey on controversial questions in AI alignment and its relationship with non-human animals. They say it will take ten minutes max, and you can fill it in here.