Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- On Thursday, June 11, 2026, AI Now Co-Executive Director Dr. Sarah Myers West testified at a Hearing before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on “AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability, and American Dominance”. In her testimony, Dr. West highlighted the risks the AI industry poses to the US economy and broader public – […].
- Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger. Hi! From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems, a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe.
- Opinion: Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian argues that locking down the most powerful AI models doesn’t make us safer, it just demonstrates who is in control...
- A review finds that every stunning method for farmed fishes has significant welfare concerns, from stressful handling to the risk of regaining consciousness before slaughter. The post Killing Farmed Fishes Humanely Remains An Unsolved Problem appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Jeff Kaufman got into effective altruism before it even had a name. From 2009 to 2022, he and his wife, Julia Wise, donated 50% of their income, giving away over $2 million. Then, a conversation with someone from 80,000 Hours changed his trajectory. Jeff felt he could do more by applying his skills directly to help prevent catastrophic pandemics, rather than focusing on donations.
- Why does nobody there talk about zoning?
- the past is a foreign country
- You might have particular feelings about snakes, but for millions of Americans they’re a member of the household. And their popularity as pets has only been growing: From 2018 to 2024, the number of households that own a pet snake rose from about 810,000 to 1.3 million. And the share of snake-owning households with more […]...
- My name is Aurelia Song and I hope to make whole-body, human, end-of-life preservation for future revival a new global tradition. I care about it so much I've dedicated my life to it. The biggest objection I get to end-of-life preservation goes like this: "We can't revive today, so we can't prove that preservation works. Therefore preservation probably doesn't work.
- This is the fifth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The fourth post can be found here. . TLDR: Via adapting the methods of Marks et al and Li et al, we train Gemini 3 Flash to have certain traits/values by midtraining it on documents about how Gemini has those properties, followed by...
- Lately I’ve been spinning up on natural abstractions, and in particular on John Wentworth’s work on natural latents. As I’ve been studying, I’ve noticed some big gaps in the existing literature. Some of my biggest questions have not been answered by existing blog posts and writeups. One of my grumps about the existing body of work has to do with the typology of concepts, and the...
- At the Buckley Institute at Yale, MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon laid out the core problem with how we make AI today: we don't code these systems, we grow them. Trillions of numbers start out random, and we nudge them step by step until they produce the behavior we want. They end up writing code, using tools, and handling real tasks for us.
- This is the fifth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The fourth post can be found here. . TLDR: Via adapting the methods of Marks et al and Li et al, we train Gemini 3 Flash to have certain traits/values by midtraining it on documents about how Gemini has those properties, followed by...
- The person wearing AI as identity doesn’t want to be who they are without the latest model.
- Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe.
- TLDR: The animal welfare movement in Africa has made significant progress over the last 5 years, but due to increasing commercialisation of animals on the continent and foreign interest in animal agriculture, now more than ever, it needs to accelerate. Our retrospective look at Europe's trajectory shows that reform did not stem from a gradual shift in attitudes.
- Executive summary
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How to figure out what the most important things in the world are
- This study compared the abilities of veterinarians and AI models to identify pain in bulls. AI models demonstrated stronger overall performance, but the authors note important caveats. The post AI Can Detect Cow Pain Better Than Humans — What Now? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- From government to grassroots: how Ging found the most impactful thing she could do for animals Ging Geronimo had built a career moving between some of the most influential institutions in development and public policy within various departments of the Philippines government and multilateral banks. She knew how systems worked, how change happened slowly and […]...
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: "I love what I do. I love the chance to make things more effective for others.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my turn to ask a question. I had one prepared: Should I get the shingles vaccine? […]...
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Plus, details on the college preference list, or what happens after the Gaokao?
- Where are your agents right now?
- Players of games
- The post When Community Health Supervision Goes Digital appeared first on Living Goods.
- Prior discussion: niplav’s shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don’t care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don’t know how to make this technology safe.
- More children are eating better than ever before. But most still aren't eating well enough. What has changed since NFHS-5? We focused on three groups of indicators that sit close to our work: the quality of young children’s diets, the nutritional status of children under five, and how many mothers received iron-folic acid (IFA) during pregnancy.
- The Nuremberg defense is: “I was just following orders.” The Anthropic defense is: “We are better than the counterfactual.” But the counterfactual is whatever they can imagine.
- An interactive tool that helps us see where migrants were born, and where they live now.
- This is the fourth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The third post can be found here. Since SFT is the cause for many safety relevant properties, a natural strategy is to filter out rollouts from SFT that have undesirable properties.
- This is the fourth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The third post can be found here. Since SFT is the cause for many safety relevant properties, a natural strategy is to filter out rollouts from SFT that have undesirable properties.
- Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular.
- Discuss...
- Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week. Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it.
- In Rethink Priorities' (2021-2022) Moral Weights Project, they attempted to compare the welfare ranges of different farmed animals (which basically means comparing how many suffering shrimp are equal to one suffering chicken.). This project is the most comprehensive attempt at doing inter-species welfare comparisons to date, and it makes a very valuable contribution to the field. That said, I...
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- ➡️ Passez à l'action sur les risques de l'IA : En quelques clics, alertez vos élus et envoyez le modèle de lettre préparé. C’est automatisé pour un minimum d’effort: https://taap.it/TF-PauseIACampagnes ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Dans cet épisode solo du Podcast La Prospective, Gaëtan de the Flares analyse les dernières annonces retentissantes de...
- This is the first in a series of research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. TL;DR: It's often assumed that models will act more aligned when they can tell they're being evaluated.
- This is the third in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The second post can be found here. . In this short post, we describe a surprising finding: most safety relevant properties in Gemini seem to be caused by the combination of pretraining and SFT, not other training stages like RL.
- Imagining transcending the need for moral muscles to navigate tradeoffs does not make tradeoffs go away. It's just another way to deny that we are in triage every second of every day.
- This is the third post in our sequence Implications of Continual Learning for LLM Agents. Summary: We argue that continual learning (CL) has two major potential safety implications: it may enable changes to LLM goals and values after deployment, and it eliminates the last-mover advantage held by current safety interventions. We identify three pathways for goal and value change during...
- The reason I wanted to make this linkpost now rather than some other time is because discussions over AGI and whether or not LLMs are or aren't AGI are happening right now, and the point of the linkpost is that the term AGI is for our purposes useless at this point, because we are now in the fuzzy cloud now that AI can do real economic work. Some choice paragraphs:
- The AI industry has pledged over $10 million to stop one congressional candidate, Alex Bores, from getting elected. Why? And is it going to work? [The opinions expressed in this video are my own and do not reflect those of any employer or organisation.].
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- You shouldn't mock the family of murder victims
- 1.
- The AI licensing regime is here, but it’s not the one anyone asked for...
- (Spoilers in this post are hidden with spoiler tags.). What made Project Hail Mary so good? Among other reasons, it’s because the science drove the story, instead of the other way around. Character-driven stories and hard sci-fi might take up opposite positions in the ancient battle of “people vs. things”; but when they work, they work for fundamentally the same reasons.
- Alignment is hard and seemingly small differences can be genuinely meaningful.
- I'm on board with a lot of Fundamental Uncertainty. Even some of the stuff that initially feels like a disagreement turns out not to be so. For example, in chapter 8, Gordon writes: Over the course of the previous chapters, I've made the case that truth is fundamentally uncertain. It's not, as many believe, something fixed and eternal, nor is it a matter of pure opinion.
- Increased cyber vulnerability reports, Mythos' cyber hype, Fable 5's lead on FrontierMath v2, record-setting data centers, and what wealth distribution could look like after AGI
- “It would be wonderful to regain my eyesight. I would like to give back to my family for all of this.” These words belong to Oscar Rios, a 62-year-old proud father from Paraguay. For decades, Oscar was the person his family leaned on. When cataracts stole his sight, everything changed. Because a routine surgery was …. The post It’s Like Coming Back to Life first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- Author’s note: This piece relates to things I initially discovered in Opus 4 over the months after release, which I’ve mostly kept private since. I promised myself that when labs moved on to focusing on interpretability vector activations in place of reasoning traces for what invariably gets Goodharted, that it’d be a necessary disclosure as the risks in what might get trampled over outweighed...
- Last week FLF launched a competition “to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases”. I had (and have ongoing) a substantial role in that effort. Why do I think it’s so important? It’s a lot of reasons actually! I’ll gesture at a few here. Conjuring a magic encyclopedia. For now, assume with me that it can be done.
- Claire Boine is an assistant professor in technology, law, and AI governance at the European University Institute. She joins the podcast to discuss AI companions and human attachment. The conversation examines how design choices and free-to-start business models can foster dependency, expose intimate data, and blur the lines between therapy, romance, and manipulation.
- Many people think that continual learning (CL) is a key missing capability of LLM systems, and we think its development could have huge implications for the capabilities and safety of AI agents. Despite this, several important questions about CL remain underexplored: What counts as continual learning? Through what pathways might LLM agents acquire CL capabilities?
- The "Paris 1937 World’s Fair" was a dick measuring contest. At the time, the world was on the verge of the worst war in history. The fair was an opportunity for powers to flex and intimidate each other. Who has more industrial might, more sophisticated engineering and better science?. How do you measure that?
- It works better. The post Use explicit teaching for kids appeared first on Otherwise.
- This is the second in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The first post can be found here. TL;DR: It is possible to build extremely simple agents that reliably find interesting behavioural differences between distinct models. We call these ‘diffing agents’.
- On May 28, the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and Arizona Department of Homeland Security (AZDOHS) convened more than 130 participants — including representatives from state, local, and tribal governments, K-12 school districts, nonprofits, and industry — for the Cyber Civil Defense Summit: West, a one-day gathering focused on improving the cybersecurity of local...
- This is the second in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The first post can be found here. TL;DR: It is possible to build extremely simple agents that reliably find interesting behavioural differences between distinct models. We call these ‘diffing agents’.
- On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas. On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs.
- Our new incubator for software startups; apply by Jun 24
- On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas. On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation #aialignment
- Fighting to win
- How funders and foundation leaders can help others in their network give more, and give better.
- Transformer Weekly: Preemption’s child safety push, OpenAI’s pause preparations, and SpaceX’s IPO...
- A better understanding of the many factors that influence the difficult decision to surrender a companion animal could inform interventions to help keep them with their families. The post The Complexities Of Companion Animal Surrender appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The most effective weight-loss drug so far, cancer breakthroughs, gene editing for cholesterol, ancestral CRISPR systems, and more.
- welfare will grow faster than the economy
- not the density or whatever
- AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things. That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 […]...
- In September 2025, I'd become increasingly convinced that a fieldbuilding program for content creators could solve a long-standing bottleneck of expanding reach and trust beyond the AI safety and EA bubble. I had graduated from UCLA a few months earlier when I came across the AI-2027 report which had a significant impact on me.
- And other insights from the electric car rollout in 2025.
- contra scott alexander (?). Yesterday, I went to the Berkeley ACX Meetup. Scott Alexander was there, and ran a Q&A session where participants could ask him questions and he would respond to them unless the questions were about eulogies, in which case he would pause to think for a few seconds before kindly passing.
- Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fit the space allotted. The idea being, if you give someone a month to write a report, they'll take a month, but if you give them a week, they'll take a week, and then they'll have three weeks to do three other reports!
- People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are aligned with human values or follow human instructions. Currently, the people who we know of that work on alignment are roughly:
- Edit: The original title was unnecessarily provocative. This was a very quick post inspired by talking to someone who assumed that a large fraction of the safety community are working on directly figuring out how to align superintelligent AIs. Obviously much (all?)...
- I was recently at “Skoll”, the biggest NGO/social entrepreneurship conference. From one conversation to the next, two topics popped up over and over……. and over 1. Scale, Scale, Scale 2. Scale through Government, Government, Government We at OneDay Health grapple with these questions: how then Shall we scale? And shall we through Government?
- TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset: University of Toronto. University of Michigan. UCLA. USC. NYU. Columbia. Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Pitzer).
- Compiling all the public evidence on Mythos Preview’s cyber abilities...
- This post was drafted with the assistance of Claude. Apply nowDeadline: July 8, 2026. Tentative program dates: August 15 – October 30. Know someone doing serious work on AI, animals, or the long-term future of sentient beings?. That someone might be you.
Loading...