Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. A draft of new AI export controls was leaked by Inside AI Policy. You’ve already received my roundup in your inbox, but here’s a very quick…

“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger Economists are used to modeling AI as an important tool, so they don’t get how it could make people irrelevant. Past technological revolutions have driven human potential further. The agrarian revolution birthed civilizations;…

Machines of Loving Grace 1 How AI Could Transform the World for the Better October 2024 I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a…

This is my first winter in Boston after coming back from Senegal. The sun sets at around 4:15 now, and it’s suddenly become extremely salient how hard it is for me to focus after dark. I’d vaguely not

Our research is centered on empirical research with LLMs. So if you are doing something similar, these tips on slide-based communication may be helpful! Background: James Chua and John Hughes are researchers working under Owain Evans and Ethan Perez, respectively. Both of us (James and John) used to…

A while back I gave a talk about doing AI safety as a YC startup. I wrote a blog post about it and thought it would be interesting to share it with both the YC and AI safety communities. Please share any feedback or thoughts. I would love to hear them! AI Safety is a problem and people pay to solve…

In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate that man-made climate change was real, imminent, and potentially catastrophic. It was a perfect opportunity for the media to start covering th

I. No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game

If you’re already donating to effective charities, you might ask: why take a public giving pledge? After all, we might think it’s easier to remain uncommitted and anonymous — to continue donating with

Grace Adams 3 min read 16 Dec 2024 When I first heard about the idea of pledging a percentage of your income to effective charities with Giving What We Can, I was sold. I knew I had more than I needed

Lucas Moore 5 min read 16 Dec 2024 When I was 17, a friend sent me Peter Singer's TED talk, and it changed my life. It opened my eyes to the immense privilege of ‘normal’ people in high-income countri

Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Happy new year! Not much has happened this

Some people (although very far from all people) are worried that AI will wipe out all value in the universe. Some people, including some of those same people, need practical advice. A Word On Thinking

tl;dr: a message to myself, and to incoming CS undergrads. even if impostor syndrome hits hard, you’re all smart and competent people. and you’re now smart and competent enough that everyone wants a p

Summary. Zero to one is a collection of notes on startups by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) that grew from a course taught by Thiel at Stanford in 2012. Its core thesis is that iterat

I took the GWWC Pledge in 2018, while I was an undergraduate student. I only have a hazy recollection of the journey that led to me taking the Pledge. I thought I’d write that down, reflect on how I f

This is a belated (and rough/short!) post for Effective Giving Spotlight week. The post isn’t meant to be a criticism of GWWC or of people who have taken the pledge — just me sharing my thoughts in th

For anyone donating their income, being aware of tax rules and making proper use of available deductions can result in significantly increased donations. There are some existing resources on US tax ru

AI looks likely to cause major changes to society over the next decade. Financial markets have mostly not reacted to this forecast yet. I expect it will be at least a few months, maybe even years, bef

Intro: The purpose of this course is to prepare you for your technical future. There is really no technical content in the course, though I will, of course, refer to a great deal of it, and hopefully it will be a good review of the fundamentals that you have learned. Do not think the technical…

I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect. First: labour means human mental and physical effort

How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability By · Published August 13th, 2019 · (opens in new window) As more

Note, To say it up front: None of this, or anything ever on this blog, is investment advice. This post on the EA form, highlighted by Tyler Cowen, points out that Transformative aligned AI would incre

There are people I can talk to, where all of the following statements are obvious. They go without saying. We can just “be reasonable” together, with the context taken for granted. And then there are

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minut

What if artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives in just a couple of years, triggering an explosion in science and technology that transforms life as we know it? Whether you find this timeline pl

My median expectation is that AGI will be created 3 years from now. This has implications on how to behave, and I will share some useful thoughts I and others have had on how to orient to short timeli

A lot of people want to form inside views on AI Safety, and this is a post about concrete advice on how to get started. I have a lot of hot takes on inside views and ways I think people misframe them,

How to Write ML Papers on-research · 04 Nov 2024 This doc is aimed at students learning to write ML papers as well as more experienced writers. It isn’t about how to do the research itself, but about how to present it in a way that makes it impactful to an ML research audience. There are many…

So8res2y192132 1 min read finally Raemon2y9218 Strong downvoted mostly to apply some token resistance in the direction away from "Logan gradient descends into maximal fun-ranty-monkey-engagement-incen

This piece is cross-posted on my blog here. I hear a lot of theories around how to work optimally. “You shouldn’t work more than eight hours a day.” “You can work 12 hours a day and be fine.” “It’s im

Introduction This post is meant to be a linkable resource. Its core is a short list of guidelines (you can link directly to the list) that are intended to be fairly straightforward and uncontroversial