Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How to figure out what the most important things in the world are
- This study compared the abilities of veterinarians and AI models to identify pain in bulls. AI models demonstrated stronger overall performance, but the authors note important caveats. The post AI Can Detect Cow Pain Better Than Humans — What Now? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- From government to grassroots: how Ging found the most impactful thing she could do for animals Ging Geronimo had built a career moving between some of the most influential institutions in development and public policy within various departments of the Philippines government and multilateral banks. She knew how systems worked, how change happened slowly and […]...
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: "I love what I do. I love the chance to make things more effective for others.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my turn to ask a question. I had one prepared: Should I get the shingles vaccine? […]...
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Plus, details on the college preference list, or what happens after the Gaokao?
- Where are your agents right now?
- Players of games
- The post When Community Health Supervision Goes Digital appeared first on Living Goods.
- Prior discussion: niplav’s shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don’t care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don’t know how to make this technology safe.
- More children are eating better than ever before. But most still aren't eating well enough. What has changed since NFHS-5? We focused on three groups of indicators that sit close to our work: the quality of young children’s diets, the nutritional status of children under five, and how many mothers received iron-folic acid (IFA) during pregnancy.
- The Nuremberg defense is: “I was just following orders.” The Anthropic defense is: “We are better than the counterfactual.” But the counterfactual is whatever they can imagine.
- An interactive tool that helps us see where migrants were born, and where they live now.
- This is the fourth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The third post can be found here. Since SFT is the cause for many safety relevant properties, a natural strategy is to filter out rollouts from SFT that have undesirable properties.
- This is the fourth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The third post can be found here. Since SFT is the cause for many safety relevant properties, a natural strategy is to filter out rollouts from SFT that have undesirable properties.
- Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular.
- Discuss...
- Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week. Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it.
- In Rethink Priorities' (2021-2022) Moral Weights Project, they attempted to compare the welfare ranges of different farmed animals (which basically means comparing how many suffering shrimp are equal to one suffering chicken.). This project is the most comprehensive attempt at doing inter-species welfare comparisons to date, and it makes a very valuable contribution to the field. That said, I...
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- ➡️ Passez à l'action sur les risques de l'IA : En quelques clics, alertez vos élus et envoyez le modèle de lettre préparé. C’est automatisé pour un minimum d’effort: https://taap.it/TF-PauseIACampagnes ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Dans cet épisode solo du Podcast La Prospective, Gaëtan de the Flares analyse les dernières annonces retentissantes de...
- This is the first in a series of research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. TL;DR: It's often assumed that models will act more aligned when they can tell they're being evaluated.
- This is the third in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The second post can be found here. . In this short post, we describe a surprising finding: most safety relevant properties in Gemini seem to be caused by the combination of pretraining and SFT, not other training stages like RL.
- Imagining transcending the need for moral muscles to navigate tradeoffs does not make tradeoffs go away. It's just another way to deny that we are in triage every second of every day.
- This is the third post in our sequence Implications of Continual Learning for LLM Agents. Summary: We argue that continual learning (CL) has two major potential safety implications: it may enable changes to LLM goals and values after deployment, and it eliminates the last-mover advantage held by current safety interventions. We identify three pathways for goal and value change during...
- The reason I wanted to make this linkpost now rather than some other time is because discussions over AGI and whether or not LLMs are or aren't AGI are happening right now, and the point of the linkpost is that the term AGI is for our purposes useless at this point, because we are now in the fuzzy cloud now that AI can do real economic work. Some choice paragraphs:
- The AI industry has pledged over $10 million to stop one congressional candidate, Alex Bores, from getting elected. Why? And is it going to work? [The opinions expressed in this video are my own and do not reflect those of any employer or organisation.].
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- You shouldn't mock the family of murder victims
- 1.
- The AI licensing regime is here, but it’s not the one anyone asked for...
- (Spoilers in this post are hidden with spoiler tags.). What made Project Hail Mary so good? Among other reasons, it’s because the science drove the story, instead of the other way around. Character-driven stories and hard sci-fi might take up opposite positions in the ancient battle of “people vs. things”; but when they work, they work for fundamentally the same reasons.
- Alignment is hard and seemingly small differences can be genuinely meaningful.
- I'm on board with a lot of Fundamental Uncertainty. Even some of the stuff that initially feels like a disagreement turns out not to be so. For example, in chapter 8, Gordon writes: Over the course of the previous chapters, I've made the case that truth is fundamentally uncertain. It's not, as many believe, something fixed and eternal, nor is it a matter of pure opinion.
- Increased cyber vulnerability reports, Mythos' cyber hype, Fable 5's lead on FrontierMath v2, record-setting data centers, and what wealth distribution could look like after AGI
- “It would be wonderful to regain my eyesight. I would like to give back to my family for all of this.” These words belong to Oscar Rios, a 62-year-old proud father from Paraguay. For decades, Oscar was the person his family leaned on. When cataracts stole his sight, everything changed. Because a routine surgery was …. The post It’s Like Coming Back to Life first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- Author’s note: This piece relates to things I initially discovered in Opus 4 over the months after release, which I’ve mostly kept private since. I promised myself that when labs moved on to focusing on interpretability vector activations in place of reasoning traces for what invariably gets Goodharted, that it’d be a necessary disclosure as the risks in what might get trampled over outweighed...
- Last week FLF launched a competition “to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases”. I had (and have ongoing) a substantial role in that effort. Why do I think it’s so important? It’s a lot of reasons actually! I’ll gesture at a few here. Conjuring a magic encyclopedia. For now, assume with me that it can be done.
- Claire Boine is an assistant professor in technology, law, and AI governance at the European University Institute. She joins the podcast to discuss AI companions and human attachment. The conversation examines how design choices and free-to-start business models can foster dependency, expose intimate data, and blur the lines between therapy, romance, and manipulation.
- Many people think that continual learning (CL) is a key missing capability of LLM systems, and we think its development could have huge implications for the capabilities and safety of AI agents. Despite this, several important questions about CL remain underexplored: What counts as continual learning? Through what pathways might LLM agents acquire CL capabilities?
- The "Paris 1937 World’s Fair" was a dick measuring contest. At the time, the world was on the verge of the worst war in history. The fair was an opportunity for powers to flex and intimidate each other. Who has more industrial might, more sophisticated engineering and better science?. How do you measure that?
- It works better. The post Use explicit teaching for kids appeared first on Otherwise.
- This is the second in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The first post can be found here. TL;DR: It is possible to build extremely simple agents that reliably find interesting behavioural differences between distinct models. We call these ‘diffing agents’.
- On May 28, the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and Arizona Department of Homeland Security (AZDOHS) convened more than 130 participants — including representatives from state, local, and tribal governments, K-12 school districts, nonprofits, and industry — for the Cyber Civil Defense Summit: West, a one-day gathering focused on improving the cybersecurity of local...
- This is the second in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The first post can be found here. TL;DR: It is possible to build extremely simple agents that reliably find interesting behavioural differences between distinct models. We call these ‘diffing agents’.
- On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas. On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs.
- Our new incubator for software startups; apply by Jun 24
- On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas. On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation #aialignment
- Fighting to win
- How funders and foundation leaders can help others in their network give more, and give better.
- Transformer Weekly: Preemption’s child safety push, OpenAI’s pause preparations, and SpaceX’s IPO...
- A better understanding of the many factors that influence the difficult decision to surrender a companion animal could inform interventions to help keep them with their families. The post The Complexities Of Companion Animal Surrender appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The most effective weight-loss drug so far, cancer breakthroughs, gene editing for cholesterol, ancestral CRISPR systems, and more.
- welfare will grow faster than the economy
- not the density or whatever
- AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things. That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 […]...
- In September 2025, I'd become increasingly convinced that a fieldbuilding program for content creators could solve a long-standing bottleneck of expanding reach and trust beyond the AI safety and EA bubble. I had graduated from UCLA a few months earlier when I came across the AI-2027 report which had a significant impact on me.
- And other insights from the electric car rollout in 2025.
- contra scott alexander (?). Yesterday, I went to the Berkeley ACX Meetup. Scott Alexander was there, and ran a Q&A session where participants could ask him questions and he would respond to them unless the questions were about eulogies, in which case he would pause to think for a few seconds before kindly passing.
- Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fit the space allotted. The idea being, if you give someone a month to write a report, they'll take a month, but if you give them a week, they'll take a week, and then they'll have three weeks to do three other reports!
- People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are aligned with human values or follow human instructions. Currently, the people who we know of that work on alignment are roughly:
- Edit: The original title was unnecessarily provocative. This was a very quick post inspired by talking to someone who assumed that a large fraction of the safety community are working on directly figuring out how to align superintelligent AIs. Obviously much (all?)...
- I was recently at “Skoll”, the biggest NGO/social entrepreneurship conference. From one conversation to the next, two topics popped up over and over……. and over 1. Scale, Scale, Scale 2. Scale through Government, Government, Government We at OneDay Health grapple with these questions: how then Shall we scale? And shall we through Government?
- TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset: University of Toronto. University of Michigan. UCLA. USC. NYU. Columbia. Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Pitzer).
- Compiling all the public evidence on Mythos Preview’s cyber abilities...
- This post was drafted with the assistance of Claude. Apply nowDeadline: July 8, 2026. Tentative program dates: August 15 – October 30. Know someone doing serious work on AI, animals, or the long-term future of sentient beings?. That someone might be you.
- Thanks to Arepo, David Thorstadt, Zeshen, and Michael st Jules for looking over this article. Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert and this is not a rigorous scientific article. This post is entirely human-written. Introduction.
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: “There are a lot of problems in the world, and so figuring out where you can have the highest level of impact with the resources that you have is actually the smartest thing you can do.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- OpenAI insists it doesn’t fund or direct LTF — but one of the super PAC’s operatives describes it as a “corporate funder” with “a say”...
- You can save lives by writing on the internet, says a guy writing on the internet
- A qualitative study of German slaughterhouse workers reveals how they manage — and occasionally struggle with — the emotional demands of killing animals. The post How Slaughterhouse Workers Learn To Emotionally Detach appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Polo GGB opened its doors to local high school students with the aim of bringing young people closer to the world of scientific research and raising awareness about malaria and vector control. Through direct interaction with our researchers, students are introduced to the innovative technologies and research projects carried out at Polo GGB, including the […].
- I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. TL;DR: It’s unclear how much the intelligence explosion will directly affect agriculture, because it's one of the least cognitive-labor-intensive industries.
- Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for
- On Tuesday, June 9, 2026, AI Now Senior Fellow, AI and Healthcare Dr. Katie J. Wells testified at a Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education & the Workforce Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. In her testimony, Dr. Wells highlighted how gig nursing platforms are targeting policymakers with legislation that upends worker protections […].
- [Update (June 11, 2026): Anthropic has since "un-silenced" the new safeguards (source).]. [Thanks to Julian Minder for helpful discussion and review.]. Claude Fable 5 and its new safeguards. Yesterday, Anthropic publicly released Claude Fable 5. Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model – a model class above Opus, Anthropic's previous premium tier – and, as assessed by multiple benchmarks, it is...
- Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that gives special priority to reducing suffering. As you might know, we at the Center for Reducing Suffering find SFE deeply compelling—it is, after all, the backbone of our work. Part of our mission is to research and build a field around SFE. Unfortunately, SFE remains highly neglected in both academia and broader moral discourse.
- Fresh features in time for the World Cup!
- Detecting Hidden Behaviors in LLMs via Activation-matched Finetuning — preprint, 2026. [ Paper] [ Code]. TLDR. Given a model with some unknown, abnormal behavior (backdoors, censorship, reward hacking,...), construct an aligned reference by training a clean model to match the suspect's residual-stream activations on a benign prompt corpus.
- California YIMBY is excited to announce our endorsement of Xavier Becerra to be the next Governor of California. This election will be pivotal for California’s future. And the choice could not be any clearer. Xavier Becerra is the best candidate…. The post California YIMBY Endorses Xavier Becerra <span class="dewidow">for Governor</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- “If you need your working day to be fulfilling, if you need to feel like you’re making a difference, trust that voice, because it means you have the passion to actually make a difference in the world. Pursue it, because we need more people with that passion doing good work.”... Read more...
- Last week, the AI company Anthropic released a blog post titled “When AI builds itself”. This led to a media frenzy, with news outlets around the world publishing headlines that the company was urging a global pause on AI development, or calling for AI non-proliferation. However, the post does not call for a pause.
- TL;DR: Recent work from Goodfire & UK AISI – Verbalized Eval Awareness Inflates Measured Safety – shows that newer open-weight models verbalize evaluation-awareness (VEA) more often, and that this inflates measured safety. Between OLMo-3-32B-Think and OLMo-3.1-32B-Think – identical base, SFT, DPO, and RL data, differing only in an additional ~3 weeks of the RLVR stage – VEA roughly doubles.
- We are seeking a Policy and Research Associate to join our team to address poverty and insecurity in low and middle-income countries by incubating solutions, rigorously testing them in the field, and working with local partners to scale what works.
- The Data and Research Associate will primarily work with Jishnu Das on (a) rolling out a health insurance study in Kenya and Nigeria; (b) harmonizing and analyzing a unique dataset of Standardized Patients studies; and (c) providing support on IRB applications and new data collection in the field.
- When somebody says something, either they mean it, or they are responsible for meaning it.
- And a vibes-based assessment of what they mean.
- Hoy celebramos que, gracias a nuestros donantes, Ayuda Efectiva ya ha salvado 1.000 vidas. Pero las cifras grandes son difíciles de visualizar: ¿qué significa realmente ese hito?
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