Running https://aiplans.org
Fulltime working on the alignment problem.
Kabir Kumar
Karma: 1,316
I like ‘What You See Is All There Is’ as mentioned by @Ebenezer Dukakis
I do not think this is a representative case (not everyone’s quitting happens around the same time as a Millennium Problem being solved) and we do not know if it wouldn’t have been larger if he’d said he’s going to go on strike against Anthropic.
That reasoning feels like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts#comments to me
I think generally, the best action would be to strike and join in protesting the company—potentially also whistleblowing, if one has information that could help with a charge against the company
Yes, this is essentially what I intended and perhaps I should just add it to the post
Yes, I broadly agree. I think essentially anyone at Anthropic/OpenAI right now should refuse to work until training runs stop and there is a treaty agreed upon and enforced, to stop training runs. Probably this proxy will have problems as well, but it’s less bad than the other ones I know of atm.
Interested in your takes on the other ideas when you get the time—also, no worries at all if the responses aren’t in the absolute best form, I also have confusions I’m interested in clarifying on this.
Yes, that’s a good point. Perhaps saying they’ll be refusing or donating all of the salary that they continue to receive to either protestors, people suing the company (e.g. families whose children died due to gpt 4o) or others?
I think I should have clarified that I meant for people to openly and loudly say they’re not going to do work for the company anymore, until they change X, not just stay at the company
I do think I wrote this in maybe the worst way I could have written it and was also surprised at the reception—though, I do think the ideas themselves are good, I haven’t given a lot of the reasoning and evidence that has led me to them. And a lot of them, such as the reasons why for outside perception, striking is a clearer signal than resigning, I haven’t said at all. And the counters to some of the obvious counterarguments such as “look how much attention people get to AI risk when they resign”.
My guess is it was a catchy/emotive title expressing a clear frustration with the selection effects that happen from all the people who object strongly enough to do something about it, leaving a company that’s very powerful and influential, leaving behind people who lack that trait, combined with an unvoiced frustration of what many have likely felt is the overly aggrandizing reception towards people who finally make a decision to leave a company that’s doing bad things.
And the first sentence not being repulsive or obviously wrong, combined with the upvote button being in the top right of the post, meaning that it can get upvotes relatively quickly, before people have read the whole thing. I predict, e.g. if the post voting buttons were only on the bottom of the post (which I think would be better voting design for LessWrong, as people could only vote on posts after getting to the bottom of it in some way, being somewhat more likely to catch another part of it that might change their mind on the way), my post would have a lot less upvotes.
just think about the counterfactual for more than 8 steps
My guess is this is a sign that the real objection is more about the vibes than any specific issue.
maybe they didn’t believe or really internalize that the problems had been solved in that hypothetical?
Ok, but they probably just won’t fire you.
I’d bet against that happening
If not obvious but the company is obviously doing broadly bad things, consistently, just refuse to work at all until those change. E.g. if at Anthropic or OpenAI, refuse to work until training runs stop
also, thanks to @Mateusz Bagiński, whose comment inspired me to finally write down most of these words
Shout out to @leogao
Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest
Just not showing up for work would be better than quitting.
if your comms policy when talking about ai in 2024 and in september 2026 are not extremely different and you write for a ~general audience, you’re doing something very wrong imo.
cc @Zvi, ControlAI, etc
I’m looking for a co founder for AI Plans! We’re making courses for enterprise lawyers to better sue AI companies and be less screwed over in contracts with them. This will change the legal precedent, making it harder for AI companies to raise money and fund training runs, increase the chances of catching warning shots (since we’ll be helping companies do better internal logging, among other things), increase the chances of the government shutting them down and a bunch of other good things. Separately, occasionally doing some alignment research—though that is a much lower priority atm.
If someone joins as a co founder and has an idea that we discuss and both agree has a higher chance of reducing p doom than the above, very happy to do that instead.I’m looking for someone who:
- is extremely morally driven—will not make excuses for sacrificing morality for convenience, power, etc and will actively make sure they’re doing the right thing and will take any advice that they’re doing the wrong thing as a prompt to actually think about and change their actions
- is very eager to update and actually change their mind and actions—and does not lie and when they learn of a way to be more honest, quickly adopt it—when someone disagrees with them, they actively look for ways this might be a sign they’re wrong about something and want to know what could be a sign of this, actively rotating and looking all around the idea, seeing if they can find a different way to interpret it that shows them they’re wrong and should update to be less wrong.
- strongly likes and cares for people
- enjoys learning
And ideally is, but also good if they have strong potential for:
- highly agentic—instead of being stuck in perceived prerequisites, they just do the thing,
- are self motivated and don’t derive a majority of their self esteem from outside validation, e.g. expert consensus, degrees/qualifications, etc
If you or anyone you know have these traits, please DM me and lets try working together for a week!! or email me at kabir@ai-plans.com
I have a bounty of $200 available for anyone who recommends someone I end up working with for 2 weeks and we both enjoy it and feel we’ve gotten good work done.
Things I’ve been told I am, that may make me enjoyable to work with:
- agentic
- nice, kind, warm, loving, etc
- original
- smart
- careful
- precise
- having lots of good ideas
Things I’ve been told I am, that may make me not enjoyable to work with:
- easily distracted
- unorganized
- not frequently enough finishing things to a polished standard
Things I know I have that are weird, that may make it difficult to work with me:
- I have a very very specific trauma related to writing. Means that when it comes to writing things that will be seen by others, or writing much at all, I’ve for a very long time, had gigantic aversions to it. I have been working on this a lot and have found a bunch of hacks around it—e.g. explaining my ideas in detail to friends in DMs, then copy and pasting that into a document, using voice notes to transcribe my ideas, etc—but am also making progress on just directly writing what I mean, for a larger audience, in a way that is more polished and not just desperately rushing the words out so that the anxiety doesn’t catch up. Not fully there yet, but making progess.
E.g. this time last year, just making private notes in my laptop would have triggered my aversion and fear, but it’s now something I do regularly. I’m also relatively comfortable typing out this shortform—but still having a lot of stress, anxiety, etc in the background, so trying to get it done pretty fast. Luckily, there seems to be a positive feedback loop occurring in some way, where generally, the more I seem to say all of what I actually meant and was thinking, in my head, the more people seem to understand and appreciate what I was saying—helping reduce the anxiety for the next time a fair bit, making it a bit easier to say then, more of what I mean.
Thank you so much for doing this!!
In case you don’t already know (but I imagine you do) Google has a union—I’ve talked with one of the organizers a while ago, happy to help get in touch.
There is also https://concernedaistaff.org which is made of current and ex staff members at AI companies, e.g. @TurnTrout.
Very happy to have played a small part in inspiring this!!