I left a large set of comments on a draft of thist post, pointing out many of them, though not all of them got integrated before the post was published (presumably because this post was published in a rush as Mikhail is part of Inkhaven, and decided to make this his first post of Inkhaven, and only had like 2 hours to get and integrate comments).
Disappointed to see this kind of note.
The post is a lot less polished than it could’ve been and doesn’t make its points as strongly as I’d like, but to the best of my knowledge, none of the criticisms in this post are false.
All of the comments that you feel like weren’t integrated contained arguments that I consider invalid.
I didn’t reply to all of your comments because didn’t see much sense in that.
Supporting the idea that the criticisms are false with a note on “Mikhail must’ve not had time” is weird, especially given that I explicitly told you all that I find the arguments in your comments invalid and didn’t want to reply in detail from my phone.
at a high enough price, the cost to the labs would be virtually guaranteed to be more than they would benefit from it,
This was not the idea. The idea was that it would be okay to provide positive value to AI companies, given enough compensation to Lighthaven.
People who donated to keep Lighthaven going are not particularly happy about this (from n=2 people).
don’t use this information in any kind of way that would hurt the party the information is about, if the harm is predictable”, which I don’t even know how to realistically implement at a policy level
This is not the request that I made. I asked to not use information adversarially: to not try to cause harm to the third party using it.
And even beyond that, I don’t think I did anything with the relevant information that Mikhail would be unhappy about
Which (1) I was not made aware of by you prior to making the post and (2) is dependent on you not having ways to use the information to hurt the third party. This post is not made because you actually did something bad that hurt the third party; it’s made because you’re the kind of person who would, according to yourself.
Roughly the aim here is to act in a timeless fashion and to not be easily exploitable
That’s not what you did.
without him offering me anything in return
You didn’t signal in any way that any of that stuff was an option.
this whole post was written in an attempt at retaliation
lol, no. It’s made because others are very sad about the details and told me I should write about them; it’s made because I don’t want people do end up regretting working with you; it’s made vaguely at the beginning of Inkhaven (I didn’t want it to be the first post, though) to not made people sad about helping me write well when it’s published.
I don’t think this post was written in an honest attempt at figuring out whether Lightcone is a good donation target.
I am pretty sure Lightcone is not a good donation target as someone who donated personally significant amounts to Lightcone and talked to friends who previously have or considered donating large amounts to Lightcone, and then regretted that/decided not to after learning about all this.
This is not the request that I made. I asked to not use information adversarially: to not try to cause harm to the third party using it.
You said: “I don’t think I have any reason to ask you to not consider it in your plans insofar as these considerations are not hurting their interests or whatever” when I asked for clarification. This clearly implies you are asking me to not consider this information in my plans if doing so would hurt their interests!
You also clarified multiple other times that you were asking me to promise to not use this information in any future conflicts or anything like that, or to make plans on their basis that would somehow interfere with the other party’s plans, even if I thought they would cause grave harm if I didn’t interfere.
You didn’t signal in any way that any of that stuff was an option.
I am really not very optimistic about making agreements with you in-particular, based on how the one conversation I’ve ever had with you went. So no, that is not an option, though I will still try to do good by what I think you care about. But I do not want to risk you forming more expectations about how I will behave which you then get angry at me for and try to strongarm me into various things I don’t want to do. It’s not been fun dealing with you on this!
(2) is dependent on you not having ways to use the information to hurt the third party.
This is just false. I am not going around trying to randomly hurt people. All I am saying, and will continue to say, is that I am not promising you that I will use this information only in ways you approve of, or the third party would approve of. The bar is much higher than simply “an opportunity presents itself to hurt the third party!”, as I have told you multiple times!
People who donated to keep Lighthaven going are not particularly happy about this.
Feel free to do a survey on this! I am sure almost all of our donors would of course have an exchange rate where instead of them donating, we just provide epsilon value to an AI company, and then they can use their money to do other good things in the world. I would be extremely surprised if your statement was true in any kind of generality.
talked to friends who previously have or considered donating large amounts to Lightcone, and then regretted that/decided not to after learning about all this.
Almost none of the information in this post is correct! If they updated because of takes like this post, then I think they just made a mistake.
To anyone else: please reach out to me if you somehow made updates in this direction, I would be highly surprised if you end up endorsing it. The only thing that seems plausible to me as a real update in the space is that for a high enough tax we will host basically arbitrary events at Lighthaven (not literally arbitrary, but like, I think we should have some price for basically anything, and I expect the tax to sometimes be very high). If you really don’t want that you should at least let me know! You can also leave comments here and I’ll be glad to respond.
Separately, I think it’s good to invite people like Sam Altman to events like the Progress Conference, and would of course want Sam to be at important diplomatic meetings. If you think that’s always bad, then I do think Lighthaven might be bad! I am definitely hoping for it to facilitate conversations between many people I think are causing harm for the world.
Supporting the idea that the criticisms are false with a note on “Mikhail must’ve not had time” is weird, especially given that I explicitly told you all that I find the arguments in your comments invalid and didn’t want to reply in detail from my phone.
Look, “three hours on a Saturday night” is not the right amount of time to give someone if you are asking them for input on a post like this. I mean, you could have just not asked for input at all, but it’s clearly not an amount of time that should give you any confidence you got the benefits of input.
Disappointed to see this kind of note.
The post is a lot less polished than it could’ve been and doesn’t make its points as strongly as I’d like, but to the best of my knowledge, none of the criticisms in this post are false.
All of the comments that you feel like weren’t integrated contained arguments that I consider invalid.
I didn’t reply to all of your comments because didn’t see much sense in that.
Supporting the idea that the criticisms are false with a note on “Mikhail must’ve not had time” is weird, especially given that I explicitly told you all that I find the arguments in your comments invalid and didn’t want to reply in detail from my phone.
This was not the idea. The idea was that it would be okay to provide positive value to AI companies, given enough compensation to Lighthaven.
People who donated to keep Lighthaven going are not particularly happy about this (from n=2 people).
This is not the request that I made. I asked to not use information adversarially: to not try to cause harm to the third party using it.
Which (1) I was not made aware of by you prior to making the post and (2) is dependent on you not having ways to use the information to hurt the third party. This post is not made because you actually did something bad that hurt the third party; it’s made because you’re the kind of person who would, according to yourself.
That’s not what you did.
You didn’t signal in any way that any of that stuff was an option.
lol, no. It’s made because others are very sad about the details and told me I should write about them; it’s made because I don’t want people do end up regretting working with you; it’s made vaguely at the beginning of Inkhaven (I didn’t want it to be the first post, though) to not made people sad about helping me write well when it’s published.
I am pretty sure Lightcone is not a good donation target as someone who donated personally significant amounts to Lightcone and talked to friends who previously have or considered donating large amounts to Lightcone, and then regretted that/decided not to after learning about all this.
You said: “I don’t think I have any reason to ask you to not consider it in your plans insofar as these considerations are not hurting their interests or whatever” when I asked for clarification. This clearly implies you are asking me to not consider this information in my plans if doing so would hurt their interests!
You also clarified multiple other times that you were asking me to promise to not use this information in any future conflicts or anything like that, or to make plans on their basis that would somehow interfere with the other party’s plans, even if I thought they would cause grave harm if I didn’t interfere.
I am really not very optimistic about making agreements with you in-particular, based on how the one conversation I’ve ever had with you went. So no, that is not an option, though I will still try to do good by what I think you care about. But I do not want to risk you forming more expectations about how I will behave which you then get angry at me for and try to strongarm me into various things I don’t want to do. It’s not been fun dealing with you on this!
This is just false. I am not going around trying to randomly hurt people. All I am saying, and will continue to say, is that I am not promising you that I will use this information only in ways you approve of, or the third party would approve of. The bar is much higher than simply “an opportunity presents itself to hurt the third party!”, as I have told you multiple times!
Feel free to do a survey on this! I am sure almost all of our donors would of course have an exchange rate where instead of them donating, we just provide epsilon value to an AI company, and then they can use their money to do other good things in the world. I would be extremely surprised if your statement was true in any kind of generality.
Almost none of the information in this post is correct! If they updated because of takes like this post, then I think they just made a mistake.
To anyone else: please reach out to me if you somehow made updates in this direction, I would be highly surprised if you end up endorsing it. The only thing that seems plausible to me as a real update in the space is that for a high enough tax we will host basically arbitrary events at Lighthaven (not literally arbitrary, but like, I think we should have some price for basically anything, and I expect the tax to sometimes be very high). If you really don’t want that you should at least let me know! You can also leave comments here and I’ll be glad to respond.
Separately, I think it’s good to invite people like Sam Altman to events like the Progress Conference, and would of course want Sam to be at important diplomatic meetings. If you think that’s always bad, then I do think Lighthaven might be bad! I am definitely hoping for it to facilitate conversations between many people I think are causing harm for the world.
Look, “three hours on a Saturday night” is not the right amount of time to give someone if you are asking them for input on a post like this. I mean, you could have just not asked for input at all, but it’s clearly not an amount of time that should give you any confidence you got the benefits of input.