I wrote this for @transformernews.ai, a publication I admire a lot! Separately, I started a new role at Longview Philanthropy, as an AI Program Officer. I'm excited to move into active grant-making, and focus on the issue of our times www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-and-syn...

Australia can lead progress, if we choose to

Recently, major AI industry players (incl. a16z, Meta, & OpenAI’s Greg Brockman) announced >$100M in spending on pro-AI super PACs. This is an attempt to copy a wildly successful strategy from the crypto industry, to intimidate politicians away from pursuing AI regulations.🧵

A smart Judith Butler response to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social www.thenation.com/article/soci...

We need to turn on the lights to stop the greatest moral atrocity of humanity www.ted.com/talks/lewis_...

Hard to estimate, but would be cool to see adjustments for counterfactuality. Like which breakthroughs would have been discovered months later by someone else vs. delayed by decades if the discoverer hadn’t succeeded

How can I repost something as hard as humanly possible

@happierlives.bsky.social , you might enjoy this finalist in an Australian art competition - it's a rendering of the World Happiness Report 2024, using a blending of each country's flag for the colour, and going left to right in global order of happiness www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/sulma...

Some very depressing forecasts on the impact of USAID cuts in the recent @asteriskmag.bsky.social special edition: asteriskmag.substack.com/p/forecast-...

Aus doesn’t have heavyweight influence or resources. ‘Progressive patriotism’ is the right path to global impact. Achieve ambitious policy to show other countries the way forward, away from authoritarianism. We are leaders against tobacco, we can be leaders everywhere www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Some highlights from our 2024:

Our 2024 annual update is live! From launching a $100M pooled fund to tackle global lead poisoning, to expanding partnerships beyond Good Ventures, to watching our grantee David Baker win a Nobel Prize — it's been a milestone year as we enter our second decade.

Over 650 political scientists who have dedicated our lives to the study of democracy & government, have signed this letter enumerating our deep concerns about this administration’s actions that undermine the Constitution and the rule of law. Please share. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Engraving on the exterior of the United States Department of Justice headquarters.

Even though Rubio promised life-saving aid wouldn't be interrupted, it has essentially been halted worldwide, interrupting HIV and TB treatment and threatening millions of lives. People are dying today because of these chaotic, inconsistent stop work orders. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/u...

Roughly 1,500 additional infants contract HIV every day this continues, completely avoidably.

Across reporting and opinion pages, the NYTimes coverage on the impact of the tragic dismantling of USAID has been impressive IMO. While there's surely room for some productive reform, USAID represents some of the US gov's most effective spending. Thousands will needlessly die.

Two weeks into President Trump’s sweeping freeze on foreign aid, HIV groups abroad have not received any funding, jeopardizing the health of more than 20 million people, including 500,000 children.

1/8 Really happy to share Open Phil’s new Request For Proposals to improve AI capability evaluations. It's been a big project for me and my colleague Catherine. Getting evaluations right is crucial — and we're ready to fund serious work to make that happen. 🧵

Be clear about what Trump and Musk’s aid axe will do: people will face terror and starve, many will die www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

James Madison wrote of the necessity of the separation of powers: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive & judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

You may have heard that Secretary Rubio issued a waiver so that life-saving HIV treatment could continue during the break-up of USAID. It has not.

I'm usually a fan of Zeynep's work, but this piece gets things exactly backwards. Her core argument is that DeepSeek makes "nonsense" of US efforts to contain the spread of AI, which have largely involved restricting the types of AI chips China can access. 🧵

Yeah so the Constitution isn’t really in effect right now

“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at NYU... The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”

Evil is evil “Every day that the 90-day aid freeze continues, over 1,000 additional people will die of malaria. These are preventable deaths, largely of children.” www.forbes.com/sites/christ...

Re. Rahm Emanuel’s “is this the hill you want to die on”: yes. Yes it is. The US government can stop tiny babies dying horrible deaths AND counter China for not very much money - yes, this is a hill worth dying on.

The 50501 Movement—or 50 states, 50 protests, one day—is garnering support throughout social media over its plan to stage demonstrations across the nation to "fight Fascism" on February 5. You can find your state location for protesting tomorrow here: www.newsweek.com/50-states-an...

Advancing next-gen malaria vaccines; improving conditions for hundreds of millions of animals; reducing lead exposure around the world. What do all these high-impact activities have in common? Let me introduce you to @openphil.bsky.social ’s Global Health & Wellbeing portfolio & a few grantees👇🧵

Somewhere between 5,500 and 8,750 babies will die of AIDS because of Trump's heinous pausing of PEPFAR, estimates @lgilbert.co Utterly sickening. www.laurenpolicy.com/p/pepfar?r=2...

20.5 million people currently receive antiretroviral treatment via PEPFAR, whose funding (and operations?) are now halted. And that's just one example.

People are going to die.

🚨 Apply for internships at Open Philanthropy by 12 Jan 🚨 7-9 interns in 3 research teams: - global health + wellbeing - global catastrophic risks - farm animal welfare Research track (masters/phd) Strategy track (policy/consulting/similar) Thread and link: jobs.ashbyhq.com/openphilanth...

I know we're supposed to treat vaccine skeptics with a lot of empathy, compassion and understanding... but it's hard to wrap your head around the total stupidity of this:

Appreciated this from @thezvi.bsky.social Full post here: www.lesswrong.com/posts/HfigEy...

The majority of philanthropy is still much more about vanity than actually helping people and animals. This is a huge moral failure, and it is not lessened by the existence of more selfish people who don’t give at all. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

A few weeks ago, I “peer-reviewed” o1-preview's ChemBio safety card and highlighted some issues about its methodology. Now that o1 is out, how does it stack up? Better! (Though there’s still room for improvement.) Here’s my new o1 scorecard. 🧵👇

Models like o1 suggest that people won’t generally notice AGI-ish systems that are better than humans at most intellectual tasks, but which are not autonomous or self-directed Most folks don’t regularly have a lot of tasks that bump up against the limits of human intelligence, so won’t see it

More people who take a sociotechnical approach to AI (many of whom think it is fake and sucks) need to condition on the fact that real advances have been made, and more are to come. Not just to avoid irrelevance, but because the sociotechnical approach is so urgently needed for what’s coming.

OpenAI knows how to boil frogs. Crossing this threshold into the battlefield under the cover of drone defence enables the eventual transition to lethal force against humans. That is where the money is; that is where they will go. Their military pivot is not complete - it's only just getting started.

If a model card reports the results of dangerous capabilities evals and doesn't specify that they were conducted with safeguards removed, you should assume that safeguards were in place for testing. Short 🧵 👇

PEPFAR is one of the most successful foreign policy programs in US history and US-Africa relations. Yet it's at risk of not being funded come March 2025. Wrote a piece on why Congress should fund PEPFAR in @brookingsinst.bsky.social: www.brookings.edu/articles/pep...

Help me grow this starter pack for technical researchers working on AGI safety! go.bsky.app/D6P44sC Some flex, but aiming for mostly technical research rather than governance/strategy. Who am I missing?

Many such cases