Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- But Anthropic and OpenAI may rapidly grow their compute share in the next few years. After that, continued scaling would require an economic transformation.
- Concerns about existing AI are overstated, while concerns about future AI are understated
- A major scientific report identifies welfare risks for Europe’s beef cows and provides evidence-based solutions, from increasing living space to ending breeding for extreme meat yields. The post A Scientific Roadmap To Reduce Suffering For Beef Cows appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Off-model SFT (SFT on outputs generated by a different model) might be an important method for controlling AI behavior. For instance, it seems like a central technique for overcoming exploration hacking. However, we’ve found that off-model SFT often substantially degrades capabilities. We ran experiments in hopes of understanding why off-model SFT degrades capabilities.
- We asked attendees at EA Global about effective altruism. Here is what Jasmine said. Find an upcoming conference at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/ea-global #effectivealtruism #EAVoxPop #EAGlobal...
- Most ancient architectural traditions have withered, but one is enjoying a golden age: Hindu temple architecture.
- Short of time? Read the key takeaways. Academic papers are worth seeking out more than most people do. They're often the only place where specific studies exist, and they can offer the most rigorous analyses available on a wide variety of topics. This article is designed as a practical guide to overcoming those barriers.
- stories of my life, and others'
- Submission deadline: rolling
- I apologize for the unproductive way I conveyed myself in the first iteration of this essay. The link will direct you to the original, less productive version of the essay, if you want the context on that. I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll say it again: I’m worried about Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s (possible) IPOs. Tl;dr: there’s a good chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI becomes a...
- I'm pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But that’s a question for another time—I’m here now to tell you about my one potentially valid peeve.
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. An odd aspect of discussing serious threats is the amount of concern people express about you causing other people to be concerned. This kind of makes sense for interlocutors who don’t believe in the … Continue reading →...
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.
- Assumed background: Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction. Suppose I have some data, and I go looking for the models (i.e. programs) which best compress that data. I find two different programs, and, which both reproduce the data using approximately the same number of bits, and that seems to be roughly the best compression possible.
- We will likely have near-superhuman mathematics AI by Q1 2027. Qualitatively, AI mathematics capabilities are developing significantly faster than automated AI R&D capabilities. Thus, we will likely have a period of time where the rate of our ability to rigorously & usefully verify and understand model behavior and model outputs outpaces the rate of R&D capability development itself. Our...
- In the second week of QRI's Tepoztlán summer 2026 research retreat (https://heart.qri.org/tepoz/) we had the chance to interview Lama Justin von Bujdoss, a lineage-holder and teacher in the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism, about some of the details of dark retreat phenomenology.
- Something has shifted. After decades of restoring sight – one surgery, one pair of glasses, one village at a time, Seva has crossed a threshold and I want you to be the first to understand what that means. The research coming out of Guatemala this year stopped me cold. When we gave coffee harvesters eyeglasses, ….
- Nine-year-old Sarun lives in Puok, a district in Siem Reap where the light is bright and unfiltered, and where childhood is stitched together from schoolbooks, cousins, and the long absence of parents working far away. He is a third grader, and has done some serious thinking about the world. Before his surgery, cataracts clouded his …. The post A Boat with an Oar. A Boy with Sight.
- The study has a name only an academic could love: Refractive error correction and harvest worker productivity in the Guatemalan coffee sector: A quasi-experimental analysis. It’s a mouthful. For this newsletter let’s call it Glasses for Guatemalan Harvesters. Seva worked with long-time partner Visualiza, Guatemala’s leading eye hospital, to send researchers to 12 coffee farms ….
- I am going to argue that we will likely eventually get AIs that are strongly power-seeking, much more so than current SOTA LLMs. TLDR: Right now SOTA LLMs are still largely in a simulator regime. This buffers against power-seeking. Long-horizon RL or similar methods (applied to LLMs or otherwise) will turn AIs into consequentialists, motivating power-seeking.
- For more than 25 years, Seva Foundation has been steadily changing the view in Cambodia. Since 1999, Seva’s long-term partnerships with national ministries, hospitals, and local nonprofits have helped reduce the country’s blindness rate from 1.2% to just 0.37%. In just the past year, Seva’s teams were everywhere at once: in government meetings helping shape ….
- When we picture sight being restored, we imagine the big moment: a bandage lifted, a face coming into focus. What we don’t picture is the “Air Puff” machine quietly doing its job without protest. In eye care, that’s its own kind of miracle. Modern ophthalmology depends on a fleet of highly specialized devices, each with …. The post The Unsung Heroes of Sight first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- The Nepal Ophthalmic Society Recognizes Dr. Chundak Tenzing’s Career From leading eye camps in Nepal’s mountainous villages to performing hundreds of corneal transplants to advancing research on the causes of blindness, the work of Seva’s Global Medical Director, Dr. Chundak Tenzing, has always been grounded in service. That service was recognized when Dr. Tenzing received …. The post Be Kind.
- Most evaluations of AI systems focus on their capabilities: how good they are at coding tasks, how effectively they can answer complex scientific questions, and so on. From a safety perspective, capability evaluations have a place: by understanding how close we are to different capabilities, and the rate of progress on them, we can forecast when different risks are likely to occur, as well as...
- Eric Braun doesn’t talk about philanthropy as a transaction. For him, it’s a frequency. Eric’s connection to Seva began decades ago in New York, when he encountered Ram Dass and the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. “A zing went through me,” he recalls, “a moment that felt like, bam! Recognition.” What drew him in wasn’t …. The post The Infinite Power of Love first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- We were saddened to learn of the passing of Bob Weir on January 10th. Bobby, as his friends knew him, was a co-founder of the Grateful Dead and one of the most generous spirits in American music. For more than 60 years, he took to the road, bringing people together through the sheer power of …. The post A Friend We’re Grateful For first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- As Wavy Gravy turns 90 in May, we’re not just marking the years; we’re celebrating a whole vibration. A co-founder of Seva and a true cosmic jester of compassion, Wavy has always shown us that service isn’t a duty, it’s a dance. He sparked a movement rooted in love, where healing and humor walk hand …. The post Still Wavy After All These Years first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- Everything you need to know about the upcoming encyclical on AI.
- Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal, Difan Jiao, Kartik Bali, Yiderigun Borjigin, Shaobo Cui, Stefan Krsteski, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West (equal contribution). These are early results, but we wanted to share them with the community now.
- Your farmed animal advocacy update for late May 2026
- There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about the benefits of technology is sensitive to the end of humanity - but this jumps over the transitions by starting from the assumption that “long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people’s lives longer, freer, and...
- How to write better
- The post Landmark new METR report: Can AIs already start ‘rogue deployments’ inside AI companies? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- In the first of two blogs, this explainer examines how Rethink Priorities compared welfare capacity across species, with results that may reshape how advocates think about impact. The post The Moral Weight Project Explained: Part 1 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- TL;DR: Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. Key highlights from this post:
- But it doesn't have to be
- Better approximate your ideal self
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- EA Forum Digest #292 Maximizing good without maximizing ourselves Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the Digest. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grantmakers (lukeprog, 3 min) Also, Talent Constraints in AI Safety: What We Know and What We Don’t (Weronika Żurek 🔸, 26 min).
- Inside GFI’s work to fund science and shape the bioeconomy.
- Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can: “We are much more powerful than we think.” See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- We’re good at solving problems, but not as good at seeing how other people solve theirs...
- There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws. They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, […]...
- maybe?
- TL;DR: Instead of labouriously computing, we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating. and this will be very close to the actual. This is useful for adding up sources of variance, or figuring out radiuses, or other such things. Background. The mathematical relationship is surprisingly common. It happens among other things in.
- This report was written by Christian de Weerd for Rethink Priorities. It was primarily meant to inform our own thinking about the merits of biological naturalism about consciousness. However, as Christian did such an excellent job on the report, we thought it might be worth sharing more broadly.
- We are excited to announce a new Request for Proposals (RFP) for effective giving organizations, defined as initiatives that raise funds for highly effective charities. Through this RFP, we aim to identify and support additional efforts in the effective giving space and streamline the application process for potential grantees. Motivation.
- Episode 17 is about carving a new sculpture tradition.
- MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon in conversation with Agents Of Tech explains why the deception and unintended behaviors we're seeing in current AI systems matter: not because GPT-5 or Claude is going to end the world, but because researchers predicted these emergent problems 10+ years ago, and we're still not on course to understand these systems deeply enough to solve them before we scale to...
- How does brain structure create different levels of intelligence? I was somewhat surprised to find that the leading researcher of the relationship between neurobiology and IQ, Richard Haier, is not mentioned anywhere on LessWrong, at least according to the search function.
- Expanding on Humans are not automatically strategic, I've noticed similar patterns for people who are working on improving their own and others' mental/emotional states. We do not automatically…. Wonder “Who like me has successfully solved this problem — and what did they do?”, then copy the most successful plans.
- I find that a lot of people have trouble with this concept of predicting the next token. And by trouble, I mean that they struggle to understand what it actually means to predict the next token. It seems simpler than it is.
- Thanks to @Jeremy Gillen for reading and commenting on the draft. This was written while I was was funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) through project code MSAI-SE01-P005. I have tried to achieve two goals in this post. The first is to provide a self-contained explanation of Natural Latents using lots of pictures of probability distributions.
- China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.
- The post Colorado led the way against farm animal cruelty. Now Congress will roll it back. appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- We all want to find a dream job, but what does they actually mean? Decades of research has found five key factors, and it's not as simple as "following your passion".
- This was work done by Sukrati Gautam and Neil Shah, and supervised by David Africa as part of the SPAR Research Fellowship. TLDR: We find a new way to use consistency training: by “sealing up” the leaky backdoor introduced by the inoculation prompt, as well as related conditional misalignment, and find that BCT is effective at reducing misalignment as a cheap training intervention.
- How a baby food seller may have caused more deaths than war across a number of years
- This review challenges “folklore husbandry” for reptiles, revealing how science, not tradition, must guide better welfare in captivity. The post From Folklore To Facts: Advancing Evidence-Based Care For Captive Reptiles appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Our current approach to fieldbuilding in the UK.
- Tldr;: (Longtermist) EAs seem more focused on non-extinction risks from AI than they used to be. I haven’t seen much discussion of why, making reference to the very longrun. Changes in the world this might be responding to are: alignment seeming more promising than it used to, the speed of AI progress, and concerns around US governance.
- The healthcare industry is ground zero for AI companies and the rollout of their products: Microsoft tells us that AI is better than doctors at diagnosing complex medical conditions. Nvidia claims that its chatbot, a partnership with the startup Hippocratic AI, can outperform nurses on detecting over the counter drug toxicities. AI firms suggest that […].
- "We are much more powerful than we think.". After finishing college in the Netherlands, Sjir Hoeijmakers knew he wanted to do something good with his career — but he didn't know what. At some point, he sat down and Googled "how can I make the world a happier place?".
- Evidence on the effect of income on health, education, crime, and child outcomes from lotteries and RCTs
- who, where, what
- [Subtitle.]. Automating R&D is not sufficient for superintelligence. This is a crosspost for The Goodhart Singularity by Tom Reed, which was originally published on Thomas's Substack on 7 May 2026. Buyer beware: bombastic claims advanced, often flippantly. AI systems are starting to build themselves.
- cart;horse: Most startups fail, this one did too. Tried too much with too little, with a little too much ego. Coordinal Research’s goal was to build an automated safety research platform. A researcher writes “Replicate X result from paper Y with tweak Z” and the system provisions a sandboxed compute environment, gathers context, writes code, runs experiments, and returns a research report...
- The post Strengthening Community Health Systems: Q1 2026 Impact Report appeared first on Living Goods.
- The post Renforcer les systèmes de santé communautaire : Rapport d’impact du T1 2026 appeared first on Living Goods.
- A new tool that let's you imagine different futures of where we might be headed
- Probably not the next global pandemic
- This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future.
- The post Our strategy at 80,000 Hours appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- This is a short summary of our new paper: arXiv, X thread, code. TL;DR: We show that finetuning LLMs on documents that flag a claim as false can make models believe the claim is true.
- Monitoring coding agents for dangerous behavior using language models requires classifying transcripts that often exceed 500K tokens, but prior agent monitoring benchmarks rarely contain transcripts longer than 100K tokens. We show that when used as classifiers, current frontier models fail to notice dangerous actions more often in longer transcripts.
- Executive summary
- Suppose we have a dangerous misaligned AI that can fool alignment audits, and distill it into a student model.
- At a conference about “AI control,” discussions and games explored ways to control untrustworthy AI...
- You--you!--can join an incredible group of people doing ridiculous amounts of good and saving hundreds of thousands of lives
- Researchers analyzed dozens of different nudges aimed at reducing meat consumption in foodservice settings and discovered that changing the default option presented to diners is the only nudge that works. The post Changing The Default Choice Should Be The Default Nudge appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Allergies are a big problem for a lot of people. If you're someone with pollen allergies, maybe you've wondered how people in the distant past dealt with them. After all, a thousand years ago people mostly worked outside all day, in areas where plants grow well. They had no air purifiers, no allergy medication, and no extra food for people who couldn't work when it was time to plant crops.
- Meet the winner of the Q4 2025 “Right!” said FRED Challenge Graham Kilvington, known as Kilvo29 on GJ Open, won the Q4 2025 “Right!” said FRED Challenge despite having no background in economics. He is a Physics graduate from the University of London and an operational research analyst in the UK civil service. In this interview, […].
- Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research.
- the latest updates on the welfare of future sentient beings
- Hello Effective Altruists!. I write to let you know that Legal Impact for Chickens is suing California’s largest poultry producer, Foster Farms, for animal cruelty. Foster Farms raises and slaughters approximately 290 million chickens per year. LIC's complaint accuses Foster Farms of crushing chickens with forklifts, forcing birds to live among the maggot-covered corpses of their dead flock...
- Purporting to give advice about how to be charitable to people you disagree with is always an act of hubris.
- Greetings from a world where…...
- some norms of conversation
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