If you’re considering donating, this might important context:
Relatedly, here’s Sam Altman at Lighthaven:
Lighthaven, as people took from your comments on EA Forum, wants to be an impartial event venue. I’m not sure you all want to give money to an impartial event venue, just like you probably wouldn’t want to give money to a random hotel that is a good conference venue (at least, you wouldn’t give from your utilons budget; you might give them money to purchase fuzzies, but be clear with yourself when this is what you’re doing.
(I also think that people shouldn’t give money to the team if they’re enjoying and getting value out of LessWrong, as the value created by LessWrong should largely be attributed to the people who write posts and to the community and not to the team; that the cost of maintaining the website could be much lower than what the team is spending.)
Come on, please stop summarizing my positions in an authoritative tone. You seem to keep giving extremely misleading summaries of my positions, and you keep doing it, even though I keep asking you to stop. Even this exact point I have already clarified like 4 different times in like 4 different contexts (1, 2, 3, 4). At least link to those or acknowledge any previous discussion!
Lighthaven is not an “impartial event venue” in the way you describe here! Lighthaven is run centrally with the purpose of trying to make the world better, on the basis of a quite opinionated worldview!
And part of that worldview is to not exclude people from spaces I run because I disagree with them! I do not ban people I disagree with on LessWrong! It would be a terribly dumb mistake to do so. It would similarly be a terribly dumb mistake to ban events from inviting people they want to talk to that I disagree with.
This would impose huge pressures of conformity on everyone close to me. Both LessWrong and events at Lighthaven are largely institutions of discourse. You don’t get better at truth-seeking if you ban anyone who disagrees with you from talking to you or your community![1]
We don’t just provide services to whoever the highest bidder is. We very heavily seek out clients who do stuff that we think is valuable to the world, as should be obvious to anyone who takes a look at our event calendar. That event calendar is not the calendar of a completely random hotel or conference venue!
When we have clients that we think aren’t doing things we are excited about, or are maybe even actively harming the world, we charge (potentially enormous) premiums. If Sam Altman himself wanted to run an event here that didn’t to me seem like it would improve some kind of important diplomatic conversation or facilitate some safety-relevant coordination, but was centrally just making OpenAI better at building ASI faster, we would end up charging a huge premium. I don’t know how much, depends on the detail and how bad the externalities of the specific event would be, but it would not be cheap!
Of course, you can disagree with our decisions on who to work with. If you really want us to ban the Progress Community from running events at Lighthaven because they want to invite Sam Altman, or want us to ban Manifest for inviting Hanania to their event, say so directly! But please don’t try to misrepresent this as some kind of general policy to just rent to the highest bidder.
I have already clarified this like 4 times. Please, for the love of god, change how you present these things, or at the very least link or mention the previous discussion. It’s extremely frustrating.
I do think there are valid reasons to exclude someone from a space like Lighthaven. I think Sam Altman has met many of those reasons, but not enough to be worth taking an action as drastic as to cut ties with any organizations that want to invite him to events they host here. Whether you like it or not Sam Altman is an important stakeholder in AI who many people want to talk to for good and valid reasons, and he isn’t violent or disruptive in a way where it would make sense to exclude him on the basis of that making discourse around him much more difficult.
You, in 2024: “I would be surprised if we never end up hosting events for scaling lab teams at Lighthaven. If they pay us a fair price (and maybe somewhat more as a tax), I will rent to them.”
I would give you the points here if you acknowledged a change in policy instead of pretending like you always said you’d charge “(potentially enormous) premiums”, that would depend on the externalities, and would not be cheap; because a year ago, you said a “fair price (and maybe somewhat more as a tax)”.
It’s not really clear to me to what extent you didn’t communicate your policy well back then, or changed it on your own in the meantime (what caused it?), or changed it because of the pushback, or what.
If you’re claiming your policy was always to charge AI companies a lot more, I’d appreciate any source where you state it prior to the progress conference.
Of course, you can disagree with our decisions on who to work with. If you really want us to ban the Progress Community from running events at Lighthaven because they want to invite Sam Altman, or want us to ban Manifest for inviting Hanania to their event, say so directly! But please don’t try to misrepresent this as some kind of general policy to just rent to the highest bidder.
The issue I’m concerned with is that your policy, whatever it is now and however you would describe it, is not really immediately visible to people who would want to know if (to the extent it’s the case) they’re subsidizing an event venue that sometimes provides value to events that are aligned with your declared values, but sometimes, to not stay unused, impartially rents itself out at a fair price to anyone, including AI companies for events that will bring the destruction of the world closer.
Like, there’s the world in which Lighthaven is basically a separate for-profit entity that rents out the venue to anyone, to not stay unused, and maybe otherwise supports events the community/your values largerly like or just spends profits to support Lightcone Infrastructure, and maybe has a preference for more aligned events when there’s a choice, but otherwise follows the “standard practice for practical[ly] all hotels and event”; and there’s a world in which Lighthaven is a fully nonprofit event venue that doers rent itself out to random events to not stay unused and support its operations, but heavily selects events for not causing harm, and would rather stay empty than help accelerate AI capabilities progress.
I would want you to specify, and your potential donors to know, where exactly on this scale Lighthaven falls.
Because people might have reasons to like Asana or the pre-collapse according-to-public-knowledge FTX, but they might not necessarily want to donate to them.
(I’m not sure how what I’m saying is already clarified by link #2, and I don’t think link #4 is relevant to this specific question?)
If you really want us to ban the Progress Community from running events at Lighthaven because they want to invite Sam Altman, or want us to ban Manifest for inviting Hanania to their event, say so directly!
I think that your policies regarding providing value to Sam Altman should be transparent to your (potential) donors; I think hosting Manifest that invites Hanania is consistent with the image you’re presenting to your donors, and passes the onion test, regardless of my views on how okay it is to platform Hanania.
I am not going to comment much on this because I really have already spent a huge enormous amount of time clarifying my perspectives here in the threads I linked. I am happy to answer other people’s questions or address their misunderstandings, and so if someone wants to second any specific part of this, I am happy to clarify more. I will only address one thing:
It’s not really clear to me to what extent you didn’t communicate your policy well back then, or changed it on your own in the meantime (what caused it?), or changed it because of the pushback, or what.
My policy has not changed at all!
It would continue to be surprising to me if we never hosted AI scaling labs teams here, for a potentially very wide variety of different taxation levels. If the Deepmind alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably give them a substantial discount! If the Anthropic alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably charge them a small but not enormous tax. If an OpenAI capabilities team wanted to host something here the tax would be much higher, as I have clarified.
Like, look man, communication is hard. I am not saying it’s totally unreasonable to walk away with the understanding that we would at most charge a modest tax for even the most vile events, but I have now tried to clarify this 5+ times with you, and you keep just making new top-level posts not linking to any previous discussion, and speaking with great confidence.
My guess is we would have disagreement about what appropriate levels of taxation are. If someone else wants to propose concrete counterfactuals about what kind of premium we would charge for different events, I would be happy to give my best guess of them, if someone is genuinely curious about my policy here.
If the Deepmind alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably give them a substantial discount! If the Anthropic alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably charge them a small but not enormous tax.
Are you saying that you believe Google Deepmind’s alignment team is doing better work than Anthropic’s alignment team? If so, that’s a noteworthy update for me. (My vague impression was that Anthropic is the least bad AI lab, but perhaps I’ve not paid enough attention.)
Yep, I am generally on the record thinking that Deepmind’s (UK) safety team is doing the best work on a few different dimensions (including taking the existential risk problem most straightforwardly seriously, and generally contributing to discourse and sanity in the space the most).
This isn’t to say I think Deepmind is a great organization! I think a non-trivial reason for my optimism here comes from the fact that the Deepmind safety team is a much smaller part of Deepmind than the Anthropic and OpenAI teams, and this allows them to specialize more into the important things, and allows them to speak more freely because their statements don’t cause everyone to panic or be taken as representative of the org.
If you’re considering donating, this might important context:
Relatedly, here’s Sam Altman at Lighthaven:
Lighthaven, as people took from your comments on EA Forum, wants to be an impartial event venue. I’m not sure you all want to give money to an impartial event venue, just like you probably wouldn’t want to give money to a random hotel that is a good conference venue (at least, you wouldn’t give from your utilons budget; you might give them money to purchase fuzzies, but be clear with yourself when this is what you’re doing.
(I also think that people shouldn’t give money to the team if they’re enjoying and getting value out of LessWrong, as the value created by LessWrong should largely be attributed to the people who write posts and to the community and not to the team; that the cost of maintaining the website could be much lower than what the team is spending.)
Come on, please stop summarizing my positions in an authoritative tone. You seem to keep giving extremely misleading summaries of my positions, and you keep doing it, even though I keep asking you to stop. Even this exact point I have already clarified like 4 different times in like 4 different contexts (1, 2, 3, 4). At least link to those or acknowledge any previous discussion!
Lighthaven is not an “impartial event venue” in the way you describe here! Lighthaven is run centrally with the purpose of trying to make the world better, on the basis of a quite opinionated worldview!
And part of that worldview is to not exclude people from spaces I run because I disagree with them! I do not ban people I disagree with on LessWrong! It would be a terribly dumb mistake to do so. It would similarly be a terribly dumb mistake to ban events from inviting people they want to talk to that I disagree with.
This would impose huge pressures of conformity on everyone close to me. Both LessWrong and events at Lighthaven are largely institutions of discourse. You don’t get better at truth-seeking if you ban anyone who disagrees with you from talking to you or your community![1]
We don’t just provide services to whoever the highest bidder is. We very heavily seek out clients who do stuff that we think is valuable to the world, as should be obvious to anyone who takes a look at our event calendar. That event calendar is not the calendar of a completely random hotel or conference venue!
When we have clients that we think aren’t doing things we are excited about, or are maybe even actively harming the world, we charge (potentially enormous) premiums. If Sam Altman himself wanted to run an event here that didn’t to me seem like it would improve some kind of important diplomatic conversation or facilitate some safety-relevant coordination, but was centrally just making OpenAI better at building ASI faster, we would end up charging a huge premium. I don’t know how much, depends on the detail and how bad the externalities of the specific event would be, but it would not be cheap!
Of course, you can disagree with our decisions on who to work with. If you really want us to ban the Progress Community from running events at Lighthaven because they want to invite Sam Altman, or want us to ban Manifest for inviting Hanania to their event, say so directly! But please don’t try to misrepresent this as some kind of general policy to just rent to the highest bidder.
I have already clarified this like 4 times. Please, for the love of god, change how you present these things, or at the very least link or mention the previous discussion. It’s extremely frustrating.
I do think there are valid reasons to exclude someone from a space like Lighthaven. I think Sam Altman has met many of those reasons, but not enough to be worth taking an action as drastic as to cut ties with any organizations that want to invite him to events they host here. Whether you like it or not Sam Altman is an important stakeholder in AI who many people want to talk to for good and valid reasons, and he isn’t violent or disruptive in a way where it would make sense to exclude him on the basis of that making discourse around him much more difficult.
You, in 2024: “I would be surprised if we never end up hosting events for scaling lab teams at Lighthaven. If they pay us a fair price (and maybe somewhat more as a tax), I will rent to them.”
I would give you the points here if you acknowledged a change in policy instead of pretending like you always said you’d charge “(potentially enormous) premiums”, that would depend on the externalities, and would not be cheap; because a year ago, you said a “fair price (and maybe somewhat more as a tax)”.
It’s not really clear to me to what extent you didn’t communicate your policy well back then, or changed it on your own in the meantime (what caused it?), or changed it because of the pushback, or what.
If you’re claiming your policy was always to charge AI companies a lot more, I’d appreciate any source where you state it prior to the progress conference.
The issue I’m concerned with is that your policy, whatever it is now and however you would describe it, is not really immediately visible to people who would want to know if (to the extent it’s the case) they’re subsidizing an event venue that sometimes provides value to events that are aligned with your declared values, but sometimes, to not stay unused, impartially rents itself out at a fair price to anyone, including AI companies for events that will bring the destruction of the world closer.
Like, there’s the world in which Lighthaven is basically a separate for-profit entity that rents out the venue to anyone, to not stay unused, and maybe otherwise supports events the community/your values largerly like or just spends profits to support Lightcone Infrastructure, and maybe has a preference for more aligned events when there’s a choice, but otherwise follows the “standard practice for practical[ly] all hotels and event”; and there’s a world in which Lighthaven is a fully nonprofit event venue that doers rent itself out to random events to not stay unused and support its operations, but heavily selects events for not causing harm, and would rather stay empty than help accelerate AI capabilities progress.
I would want you to specify, and your potential donors to know, where exactly on this scale Lighthaven falls.
Because people might have reasons to like Asana or the pre-collapse according-to-public-knowledge FTX, but they might not necessarily want to donate to them.
(I’m not sure how what I’m saying is already clarified by link #2, and I don’t think link #4 is relevant to this specific question?)
I think that your policies regarding providing value to Sam Altman should be transparent to your (potential) donors; I think hosting Manifest that invites Hanania is consistent with the image you’re presenting to your donors, and passes the onion test, regardless of my views on how okay it is to platform Hanania.
I am not going to comment much on this because I really have already spent a huge enormous amount of time clarifying my perspectives here in the threads I linked. I am happy to answer other people’s questions or address their misunderstandings, and so if someone wants to second any specific part of this, I am happy to clarify more. I will only address one thing:
My policy has not changed at all!
It would continue to be surprising to me if we never hosted AI scaling labs teams here, for a potentially very wide variety of different taxation levels. If the Deepmind alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably give them a substantial discount! If the Anthropic alignment team wanted to host something here I would probably charge them a small but not enormous tax. If an OpenAI capabilities team wanted to host something here the tax would be much higher, as I have clarified.
Like, look man, communication is hard. I am not saying it’s totally unreasonable to walk away with the understanding that we would at most charge a modest tax for even the most vile events, but I have now tried to clarify this 5+ times with you, and you keep just making new top-level posts not linking to any previous discussion, and speaking with great confidence.
My guess is we would have disagreement about what appropriate levels of taxation are. If someone else wants to propose concrete counterfactuals about what kind of premium we would charge for different events, I would be happy to give my best guess of them, if someone is genuinely curious about my policy here.
Tangent:
Are you saying that you believe Google Deepmind’s alignment team is doing better work than Anthropic’s alignment team? If so, that’s a noteworthy update for me. (My vague impression was that Anthropic is the least bad AI lab, but perhaps I’ve not paid enough attention.)
Yep, I am generally on the record thinking that Deepmind’s (UK) safety team is doing the best work on a few different dimensions (including taking the existential risk problem most straightforwardly seriously, and generally contributing to discourse and sanity in the space the most).
This isn’t to say I think Deepmind is a great organization! I think a non-trivial reason for my optimism here comes from the fact that the Deepmind safety team is a much smaller part of Deepmind than the Anthropic and OpenAI teams, and this allows them to specialize more into the important things, and allows them to speak more freely because their statements don’t cause everyone to panic or be taken as representative of the org.
Also briefly:
I agree! A picture of Sam Altman at Lighthaven is literally in the top-level post you are commenting on!