I want to be a counterpoint to this. Ariel Simnegar and I made AltX, which, while we shut down, I think it’s hard to say did anything ethically questionable apart from merely trading crypto. We didn’t do any scams, no pump and dumps, no nothing. We didn’t make crazy amounts of money but we made a decent amount of money for our investors and ultimately decided to shut down since it seemed we would have trouble raising enough money and scaling our arbitrage strategies to make the effort worthwhile. All investments and profits were returned to investors without issue and I continue to have a good relationship with our investors.
mabramov
Karma: 70
I appreciate this post, upvoted. I agree with basically all the reasons for donating. Alex Bores is one of the few potential politicians who has shown any care at all about existential risk from AI, has great EA-minded staff around him, cares about other EA priorities (like AW), and rare for a politician, seems like he might be an overall decent person.
I want to push back on the career implications/career capital costs of making a donation like this. I think EAs are, by in large, far too paranoid about these kind of risks and stress out about analyzing them so I want to give the following points.
Nobody cares. People in practice simply don’t look up this type of stuff. They just don’t. Have you ever done checked the political donations of even your closest friends/family? If you’ve ever hired somebody, have you ever looked into them on this type of thing on a background check? Nobody is following your life that attentively other than you. Everyone else is like you, they don’t look up random people’s political donations. You can dance and donate like nobody’s watching because nobody is.
This type of donation is extremey defensible and justifiable. When asked about it, you simply say “yes, existential risk from AI is one of my top priorities and Alex was one of the few politicians taking it seriously at the time”. If he does something bad in the future you just say “yes, at the time he seemed to care about AI safety. Unfortunately I was wrong”.
People forget and change their minds. The current President, Donald Trump is not someone who most would consider to be accepting of criticism and dissent, to put it lightly. With that in mind, here are some things JD Vance has said about Trump prior to become Vice President:
“My god, what an idiot.”
“America’s Hitler” or a “cynical asshole like Nixon.”
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.”
“Trump is cultural heroin.”
Other Trump appointees have said similar things. In practice, this type of stuff just doesn’t matter. The half life of the importance of donations/speech on careers is extremely short, if it even matters in the first place
Here are some more additional reasons to make this donation:
There’s a limit to who can donate and how much they can donate. Only US citizens and permanent residents can donate up to a certain amout.
As much as possible, it’d be good for there to be a political coalition for people that care about AI safety. Showing that this exists will make AI safety a more politically salient issue, somewhat like environmentalism.
This is a great post. Good eye for catching this and making the connections here. I think I expect to see more “cutting corners” like this though I’m not sure what to do about it since I don’t think internally it will feel like corners are being cut rather than necessary updates that are only obvious in hindsight.
Remmelt and I have made a bet at $5k:$25k odds on if there will be an AI market crash by the end of 2026 with a crash being designated if 2⁄3 of the following criteria are met:
OpenAI 2025 or 2026 yearly revenue is below $1.6 billion.
Anthropic 2025 or 2026 yearly revenue is below $400 million.
Nvidia revenue for any quarter in the range of Q3 2025 to Q4 2026 under the ‘data center’ category (covering the same revenue items, even if renamed/moved to something else) is below $8.5 billion.
Source for the first two criteria will be public statements by the companies or by credible reporting. Nvidia data centre revenue will be as reported by Nvidia.
We will make a formal post on it shortly
Remmelt, if you wish, I’m happy to operationalize a bet. I think you’re wrong.
That doesn’t seem like the right analogy. The bonds are forced to fold over themselves because electrons repel each other and don’t want to touch. So the natural structures are mostly tetrahedral structures. Think of the vertices of a tetrahedron having edges that shoot towards and meet at the centre and you will see that these form 109° angles. When you imagine a bunch of these connected, you will see that they all start folding over themselves and will need to take up the same space which, is not possible because the electrons will repel. So you get distortions and all kinds of stuff to push them away and then it’s all complicated by a bunch of weak forces. The primary thing giving structure is this long string of covalent bonds.
Also, “forces in the lipid layer surrounding cells” are not proteins
I just made my account but I want to remind everyone that you cannot make inferences on how good your prediction (or how good of a bet this was) based on one data point (how this election turned out). If you want to dig deep into the odds that every state was given, you can start to make a case, but anyone with the gut reaction that since the election was close, this was a bad bet, are wrong.
I agree with this (and made this assessment about a month ago). I have asked Remmelt for payment. Id be happy to make a new similar bet. I dont see reason to believe there will be an AI crash.