The magnitude of investment decisions is so small compared to your career or even donations though, such that I think a non-tech portfolio is dominated by investing in tech and donating. Like, Nvidia will probably spend $2 trillion on the AI buildout in the next couple of years if no pause happens. If a pause does happen, it’ll be maybe $1 trillion. So the delta is $1 trillion. Other than not investing in them, how can you achieve a marginal reduction in investment? Plausibly you can do >100x better by donating.
METR’s entire budget is a few million (there are ~35 employees) and I think there’s at least a 2.5% chance that METR substantially contributes to a pause in worlds where AI looks unacceptably dangerous. Suppose that their contribution in such worlds is 10%, so the expected reduction in AI buildout is $2.5B. If you could double this with another $50 million, you would buy another $2.5B of expected reduction in AI buildout, which is a 50:1 ratio. This ignores all the other things METR will probably do, like cause companies to invest $billions more in safety research, make that research more effective through objective standards, and publish safety research itself.
Now suppose you invested $5B in Nvidia and half the money went straight to the AI buildout, adding $2.5B. If the returns are more than 1% higher you would be better off investing in them and donating the excess. Nvidia has outperformed the S&P by ~500% over the past 5 years, so investing and donating passes cost-benefit by over two orders of magnitude.
If you think I’m biased towards my employer, there are probably better donation targets than METR, e.g. a dozen other AI safety nonprofits, plus political donations. But basically, I think avoiding investing in tech is strongly -EV unless you have a specific deontological prohibition on it.
I’ve been chewing on this a bit more, I think your assumptions around the chance of METR contributing to a pause and METR’s contribution are doing a lot of heavy lifting here to get to your >100x better by investing and donating conclusion.
A concern I have is that AI and tech companies might also have paths that offer leverage in terms of impact per dollar spent. For example lobbying might offer 20:1 leverage in terms of dollar spent vs expected increase in AI buildout due to less likelihood of pause. Safety washing and media campaigns might be similar.
At the very least it should be apparent that lobbying is an option available for both sides, and I can’t see why pro-pause and anti-pause lobbying wouldn’t be symmetrical in value gained per dollar spent. So for donations to AI charities focused purely on lobbying there might not be much additional leverage achieved above and beyond what the tech company is able to achieve from your additional cash injection through their own lobbying.
Agree that I didn’t provide evidence for METR specifically. My larger point was that AI safety in general has several, and you only need the best one to achieve <1% of my claimed cost-effectiveness for it to pass cost-benefit.
Now to your point:
METR mostly does science and science communication, not lobbying. The side whose lobbyists have truth will have a vast advantage—if the science is legible. And unlike other fields e.g. oil companies’ climate FUD playbook, many facts about AI can be made legible because evals often just make rigorous observations of extremely large effect sizes.
E.g. if AI companies tried to publish the opposite of the time horizon graph last year, eg claiming that o1 couldn’t do tasks much longer that GPT-2 could do, despite METR’s estimate being that o1′s time horizon was ~1,000 times longer, it would be so obviously false that everyone would ridicule them. I expect the same to be true of control and alignment claims going forward.
In particular, lobbying that neutrally informs legislators has a much higher return than average lobbying.
Ok, suppose the truth doesn’t matter and all lobbying is bribery. Then it’s true that donating to an anti-LTF PAC would only trade roughly 1:1 with LTF. But you can still do substantially better than this because things like donations to candidates and capacity-building are multiple times more leveraged than PAC money.
The marginal return of Nvidia lobbying will be much less than 20:1. They do things in decreasing order of marginal return, so they will do all their 20:1 lobbying opportunities with their first trillion dollars, whether you invest in them or not. It would be strange if having $3.01 trillion rather than $3 trillion let them build, say, $2.20 trillion rather than $2 trillion of datacenters—more likely it is closer to 1:1.
I agree that your original argument is locally valid so it’s probably not much below 1:1 either.
100% agree that career and donations are impactful. I still think the allocation of capital can be too.
I’m not going to challenge your strategy around investment and then donation. For those with higher confidence that they have a place to donate that provides leverage such that the end result is +EV then I can see how that makes sense. Particularly if you have longer timelines.
I personally don’t have enough confidence in the potential impact of donation targets to be sure that following such a strategy will outweigh the certain -EV of contributing directly to the build out. If I was closer to some of the safety organisations involved maybe it would be different.
I think my challenge to the specific argument of “your investing has no impact on the spending of big tech” is still valid. I think your strategy is compatible with this challenge, you just try to offset the -EV with greater +EV through donation later on.
The magnitude of investment decisions is so small compared to your career or even donations though, such that I think a non-tech portfolio is dominated by investing in tech and donating. Like, Nvidia will probably spend $2 trillion on the AI buildout in the next couple of years if no pause happens. If a pause does happen, it’ll be maybe $1 trillion. So the delta is $1 trillion. Other than not investing in them, how can you achieve a marginal reduction in investment? Plausibly you can do >100x better by donating.
METR’s entire budget is a few million (there are ~35 employees) and I think there’s at least a 2.5% chance that METR substantially contributes to a pause in worlds where AI looks unacceptably dangerous. Suppose that their contribution in such worlds is 10%, so the expected reduction in AI buildout is $2.5B. If you could double this with another $50 million, you would buy another $2.5B of expected reduction in AI buildout, which is a 50:1 ratio. This ignores all the other things METR will probably do, like cause companies to invest $billions more in safety research, make that research more effective through objective standards, and publish safety research itself.
Now suppose you invested $5B in Nvidia and half the money went straight to the AI buildout, adding $2.5B. If the returns are more than 1% higher you would be better off investing in them and donating the excess. Nvidia has outperformed the S&P by ~500% over the past 5 years, so investing and donating passes cost-benefit by over two orders of magnitude.
If you think I’m biased towards my employer, there are probably better donation targets than METR, e.g. a dozen other AI safety nonprofits, plus political donations. But basically, I think avoiding investing in tech is strongly -EV unless you have a specific deontological prohibition on it.
I’ve been chewing on this a bit more, I think your assumptions around the chance of METR contributing to a pause and METR’s contribution are doing a lot of heavy lifting here to get to your >100x better by investing and donating conclusion.
A concern I have is that AI and tech companies might also have paths that offer leverage in terms of impact per dollar spent. For example lobbying might offer 20:1 leverage in terms of dollar spent vs expected increase in AI buildout due to less likelihood of pause. Safety washing and media campaigns might be similar.
At the very least it should be apparent that lobbying is an option available for both sides, and I can’t see why pro-pause and anti-pause lobbying wouldn’t be symmetrical in value gained per dollar spent. So for donations to AI charities focused purely on lobbying there might not be much additional leverage achieved above and beyond what the tech company is able to achieve from your additional cash injection through their own lobbying.
Agree that I didn’t provide evidence for METR specifically. My larger point was that AI safety in general has several, and you only need the best one to achieve <1% of my claimed cost-effectiveness for it to pass cost-benefit.
Now to your point:
METR mostly does science and science communication, not lobbying. The side whose lobbyists have truth will have a vast advantage—if the science is legible. And unlike other fields e.g. oil companies’ climate FUD playbook, many facts about AI can be made legible because evals often just make rigorous observations of extremely large effect sizes.
E.g. if AI companies tried to publish the opposite of the time horizon graph last year, eg claiming that o1 couldn’t do tasks much longer that GPT-2 could do, despite METR’s estimate being that o1′s time horizon was ~1,000 times longer, it would be so obviously false that everyone would ridicule them. I expect the same to be true of control and alignment claims going forward.
In particular, lobbying that neutrally informs legislators has a much higher return than average lobbying.
Ok, suppose the truth doesn’t matter and all lobbying is bribery. Then it’s true that donating to an anti-LTF PAC would only trade roughly 1:1 with LTF. But you can still do substantially better than this because things like donations to candidates and capacity-building are multiple times more leveraged than PAC money.
The marginal return of Nvidia lobbying will be much less than 20:1. They do things in decreasing order of marginal return, so they will do all their 20:1 lobbying opportunities with their first trillion dollars, whether you invest in them or not. It would be strange if having $3.01 trillion rather than $3 trillion let them build, say, $2.20 trillion rather than $2 trillion of datacenters—more likely it is closer to 1:1.
I agree that your original argument is locally valid so it’s probably not much below 1:1 either.
100% agree that career and donations are impactful. I still think the allocation of capital can be too.
I’m not going to challenge your strategy around investment and then donation. For those with higher confidence that they have a place to donate that provides leverage such that the end result is +EV then I can see how that makes sense. Particularly if you have longer timelines.
I personally don’t have enough confidence in the potential impact of donation targets to be sure that following such a strategy will outweigh the certain -EV of contributing directly to the build out. If I was closer to some of the safety organisations involved maybe it would be different.
I think my challenge to the specific argument of “your investing has no impact on the spending of big tech” is still valid. I think your strategy is compatible with this challenge, you just try to offset the -EV with greater +EV through donation later on.