BrianTan

Karma: 59

I’m an Operations Associate at Arcadia Impact, a UK nonprofit that empowers people and organisations to tackle pressing global issues, with a focus on AI safety and governance.

Before joining Arcadia, I:

co-founded WhiteBox Research and led its operations and marketing. WhiteBox aims to develop more AI interpretability and safety researchers in Asia.
was a Group Support Contractor for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) for two years, where I helped support EA groups around the world.
co-founded EA Philippines and worked full-time as a community builder for EA PH in 2021.

You can reach out to me at brian [at] arcadiaimpact [dot] org or find me on LinkedIn.

BrianTan 6 Jan 2025 4:11 UTC
18 points
4
on: Recent Sam Altman statements on AGI and ASI
Thanks for linking these! I also want to highlight that Sam shared his AGI timeline in the Bloomberg interview: “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term, and getting that right seems really important.”

BrianTan 28 Dec 2024 14:11 UTC
8 points
6
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: evhub’s Shortform
My typo reaction may have glitched, but I think you meant “Don’t push the frontier of capabilities” in the last bullet?

BrianTan 19 Dec 2024 12:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models
I’ve only read the blog post and a bit of the paper so far, but do you plan to investigate how to remove alignment faking in these situations? I wonder if there are simple methods to do so without negatively affecting the model’s capabilities and safety.

BrianTan 19 Dec 2024 11:40 UTC
3 points
0
on: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models
Thanks for doing this important research! I may have found 2 minor typos:
1. The abstract says “We find the model complies with harmful queries from free users 14% of the time”, but in other places it says 12% - should it be 12%?
2. In the blog post, “sabotage evaluations” seems to link to a private link

BrianTan 5 Dec 2024 4:17 UTC
3 points
0
on: Brief analysis of OP Technical AI Safety Funding
Thanks for this analysis! A minor note: you’re probably aware of this, but OpenPhil funds a lot of technical AI safety field-building work as part of their “Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building” grants. So the proportion of field-building / talent-development grants would be significantly higher if those were included.

BrianTan 6 Aug 2024 9:35 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation
Thanks for making this! This is minor, but I think the total should be $189M and not $169M?

BrianTan 22 Aug 2023 17:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Ideas for improving epistemics in AI safety outreach
Your last sentence in the first paragraph seems to be cut off at “gets a lot more than”!

BrianTan 5 Jul 2023 5:40 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ozhang’s comment on: $20K In Bounties for AI Safety Public Materials
I’m following up on Leon’s question—have the results already been posted? If not, when will they be posted (if they will be)? I’m curious to know. Thanks!

BrianTan 26 Nov 2021 9:22 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: BrianTan’s comment on: Rapid Increase of Highly Mutated B.1.1.529 Strain in South Africa
And this thread from Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding is worrying too.

BrianTan 26 Nov 2021 9:07 UTC
10 points
0
on: Rapid Increase of Highly Mutated B.1.1.529 Strain in South Africa
Thanks for this. This tweet from Dr. Jacob Glanville, founder and CEO of Centivax, makes me worried about this variant too:
The new B.1.1.529 strain out of South Africa has 15 mutations in the RBD where majority of neutralizing antibodies bind. The current vaccines and even Delta-based vaccines probably won’t work against this new strain. Swift, vigorous containment is needed.

BrianTan 4 Jun 2021 0:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Curated conversations with brilliant rationalists
There’s Otter.ai which costs $8-30/month depending on which plan you get. You can try their free plan too to get a feel of how good their transcription is.
I haven’t used rev.com compared to Otter, but I think it also takes ~1x the time of the audio to fix the mistakes of Otter.ai, which would make it similar in time-cost to fixing Rev.com transcripts. So Otter.ai might be a way cheaper option than Rev.com. And the transcripts should be ready within 30-60 minutes of you upload it, given that it’s AI-based, versus Rev, which I think is actual people typing your transcript.

BrianTan 1 Apr 2021 13:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: CraigMichael’s comment on: Should I advocate for people to not buy Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 in the Philippines for now?
Thanks for linking both of those resources! I hadn’t heard of CETF before. I’m not sure how much to trust CETF, but that’s an interesting resource. Their website led me to the New York Times’ treatment tracker though, and generally I find the NYT pretty reputable. I wonder why fluvoxamine, and to a smaller extent remdesivir, aren’t talked about a lot yet in the Philippines as having promising evidence as a treatment for COVID.
Thanks also for linking Scott’s article. I had heard of it but hadn’t read it much until today. It’s interesting that he only thinks Vitamin D has a 25% chance of being effective. I would defer to him on that, but yeah I agree with him that the benefits of taking it likely outweigh the costs.

BrianTan 1 Apr 2021 13:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Should I advocate for people to not buy Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 in the Philippines for now?
This was really helpful Jim!
When I said public advocacy though, I mainly meant making a Facebook post communicating my beliefs about Ivermectin and whether people should take it or not, which 50-500 people in my network might see. So I could convey my beliefs honestly about Ivermectin in that post and at length, and I’m open to conveying I am uncertain about it.
That being said, from your comment, I realize that there’s a large chance that whatever beliefs I communicate about Ivermectin will be wrong, and being wrong about it publicly can tarnish my reputation. It’s also hard to communicate nuance about it, and I’m no expert here. So based on your comment, I don’t plan on making any public post about Ivermectin to my network.
Thanks for linking about UpToDate, PubMed, and medrxiv. I hadn’t known of UpToDate and PubMed, and didn’t really take note of medrxiv. I’ve also heard about and used Google Scholar before, but I forgot to use it for my recent research on COVID. I was mainly searching on Google and adding “NCBI” to the end, like “Vitamin D COVID-19 studies NCBI”.
Also, do you have any resources, articles, or books to recommend on how to get better at doing literature review / distillation work, whether on politicized/fast-moving or non-fast moving topics? I want to get better at this skill and am not sure where to start. Thanks!

BrianTan 3 Oct 2020 10:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Sunday Meetup: Workshop on Online Surveys with Spencer Greenberg
Hi Raemon, the link above is broken, could you fix it?

BrianTan 15 Mar 2020 15:37 UTC
6 points
0
on: Interfaces as a Scarce Resource
This is my first time seeing a UI/UX design related post here on LessWrong.com. And as a UI/UX designer myself, I’m glad to see this post and that it got curated!