Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

openphilanthropy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 186 posts

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#121

Post by jaibot »

_benedict wrote: post #118
jaibot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a GiveWell rec, it's an OPP grant. OPP literally exists to give away Dustin's money. Go to OPP's (or Good Ventures') site and notice the glaring lack of a donate button.

"The Open Philanthropy Project is a collaboration between Good Ventures and GiveWell in which we identify outstanding giving opportunities, make grants, follow the results, and publish our findings. The Project is not, itself, an organization." edit: I cannot reply to the below, so I will edit my comment. I am aware that GiveWell does not invest money . Instead it provides impartial analysis of investment impact . My…

And then there's the next paragraph:

> The Open Philanthropy Project typically recommends grants to the Open Philanthropy Project fund, a donor advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Support for the Open Philanthropy Project fund comes primarily from Good Ventures, though other donors have contributed as well. In some cases, the Open Philanthropy Project makes grant recommendations directly to Good Ventures.

It's basically all GV money - that is to say, Dustin and Cari's money.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#122

Post by icebraining »

jaibot wrote: post #117
icebraining wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, we have good evidence that all those things actually happen (except maybe the nuclear winter), and that they are/were increasing. Meanwhile, all we have from the AGI doomsday people is sci-fi stories, and actual programs that still can barely distinguish a cat from a mole even after looking at thousands of pictures.

It would be really useful if there were some historical example of a sudden increase in intelligence leading to a new class of agents taking over the Earth and determining it's future. Or maybe if there were any evidence that AI capabilities are increasing, like becoming dominant at Chess or Go, driverless cars, or a slew of recent papers on transfer learning. Maybe if one of the co-authors of the leading AI textbook…

Driverless cars are a great example. Thirty years after the Navlab¹, and twenty after it did a travel from Washigton to San Diego mostly by itself², we still don't have a viable model that can safely navigate even an highway. But "human-level AI" is ten year away?

To me, all these discussions sound like someone who read The Earth to the Moon in 1865 and started working on how to avoid getting humans harmed by the explosion in the barrel.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntIczNQKfjQ

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdQ5rsVgPuk

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#123

Post by notahacker »

nilstycho wrote: post #116
_benedict wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know - it certainly seems to me that this seriously tarnishes the credibility of Give Well, whose stated aim is to improve everyone's (not just Dustin's) charitable resource allocation. The likelihood that this $30m is the best possible use of that money? It just happens to be that this personal connection occurs by chance? Pretty much zero. Of course all opportunities in life are down to your network, but th…

This personal connection did not occur by chance, but the causality you assign is reversed. Holden did not support OpenAI because his housemates work there. Rather, it is because of their similar worldviews that they live together in the first place. It is unsurprising that people who think safe AGI is a critically important investment end up in the same social circle.

Holden isn't an AGI researcher though, he's a person who's made his name arguing that some charities are much more efficient uses of money than others. Indeed when asked to review the Singularity Institute, as well as criticising the organisation itself he gave long and detailed arguments why he didn't think unfriendly AGI was a threat, was sceptical about trying to combat it through AI research and dismissed the general form of arguments about the crucial importance of donating to it as "Pascal's mugging". At best you could say he was more open-minded towards the possibility his mind might be changed on the issue than the average person.

It would be difficult to imagine that two people with very close relationships to him working for OpenAI haven't influenced his apparent change of heart; whether they've converted him to the cause by sheer force of intellectual argument or not it doesn't look great.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#124

Post by notahacker »

hawkice wrote: post #48
jaibot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holden's dedicated a huge chunk of his career to moving hundreds of millions of dollars to alleviating poverty and disease. He's one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. You may disagree with his decision here, but to dismiss his efforts, saying it "sucks" and isn't "effective, or even altruistic", while ignoring the extensive public writing he's done on the subject that led him to these views and stra…

> strawmanning his position as nepotism So, you obviously feel strongly about this, but let me explain why your comments are less persuasive for those of us outside this subculture: The non-profit they donated to is (by any reading of their mission statement) an organization designed to create new technology that "will be the most significant technology ever created by humans" according to their own statements. It do…

Moreover, to add further context, the whole basis of Holden's effective altruism work has been around the idea that philanthropic dollars ought to be focused on charities with extremely rigorous proof behind how much they improve people's lives per dollar donated, and how much they need the money.

That context makes advising a donor to direct an "unusually large" sum to an organisation with an extremely vague goal and no tangible measure of progress towards it, little of the transparency demanded of other charities and existing funding commitments well in excess of their spending plans look like an extremely strange decision long before you read the disclosure statement.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#125

Post by FeepingCreature »

idlewords wrote: post #62
jaibot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We have to defuse this bomb or it will destroy the city in one hour!" "But there are people suffering right now !"

Twist: the bomb is a cartoon someone drew on a napkin

Twist: there's an actual bomb, but everybody thinks you're talking about a napkin.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#127

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jaibot wrote: post #104
idlewords wrote: post #57

Scroll to the end. This is a $30M grant to the guy's roommate and future brother-in-law. Unbelievable.

I want to make sure I fully understand the accusation here. You're saying that the Open Philanthropy Fund - which is funded by an $8.3 billion grant from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, also close associates - is funneling $30M money to an organization that pays below market rates ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-compensation-like-at-the-non-p... ), run by people who have dedicated their professional careers and milli…

Accidental nepotism is still nepotism, and should be actively avoided.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#128

Post by nbouscal »

argonaut wrote: post #96
nbouscal wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your suggested alternative? It's really easy to criticize, but a lot harder to do any better. If you aren't suggesting any other methods, you're implicitly saying we should just ignore the problem. I really don't think that will end well.

You admit that you don't know what the actual probabilities are. Or you admit you have an extremely low confidence in your estimate of the probabilities.

Have you read any of the estimates? Basically every expert gives a huge confidence interval, as do most of the people actively working on AI risk.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#129

Post by nbouscal »

riffraff wrote: post #92
nbouscal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what I take to be the main point of your argument, which is that OpenAI will use the money for a variety of different things, many of which aren't averting the apocalypse, and that those things are good. I think it's important to note, though, that Andrew Ng's perspective is far from a consensus one. For one thing, overpopulation on Mars is something that can easily be dealt with when it happens, whereas…

That poll is interesting, but IMHO shows the implicit meaninglessness of predictions to 10/20 years. Do you feel we've done 30% of the work towards human level AI between 2014 and 2017, given a target of 2024?

We went from not even beating good amateurs at go to beating the best pros in the world. I don't think it's like a progress bar we should be expecting to fill at a linear pace, but, that certainly seems like a strong indicator we've come a long way (and it's one of many examples I could have chosen).

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#130

Post by nbouscal »

icebraining wrote: post #113
nbouscal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been personally told by multiple different people who scoff at AI risk that it will be totally fine, so it's not a straw man. The median expert estimate for when we'll be 10% likely to have human-level AI is ~10 years. AI risk research didn't receive a penny of funding until the last few years, and is still funded at way lower levels than a lot of things that have dramatically less impact. In nearly every debate…

That number didn't pass my sniff test, so I went looking. It seems to have come from here[1], which aggregates a series of surveys. I first opened the "FHI Winter Intelligence" report: it's an informal survey made to 35 participants of a conference, of which only 8 work on AI at all (let alone be an expert in AGI). I then looked at the "Kruel interviews", which the site reports as giving a prediction of "2025" for 10…

Sorry, gave a citation in another comment on the thread but not in this one. I was referencing http://sophia.de/pdf/2014_PT-AI_polls.pdf
Post reply on HN