EpochAI is an Effective Altruism charity funded by Open Philanthropy. Like all EA orgs their goal is to maximize quantifiable positive impact on humanity per charitable dollar spent.
Some of their notable quantified impacts include
Epoch received .96 million in funding from Open Philanthropy. That’s equivalent to the lifetime income of roughly 20 people in Uganda. Epoch got 350k Twitter impressions, and 350k is four orders of magnitude greater than 20, so this illustrates just how efficient EAs can be with charitable funding.
Epoch’s latest project is an interactive prophecy for the arrival time of the singularity. This prophecy incorporates the latest advances in Bayesian eschatology and includes 12 user-adjustable input parameters.
Epoch’s prophecy model for the arrival time of the singularity
Of these parameters, 6 have their default values set by the authors’ guesswork or by an “internal poll” at Epoch. This gives their model an impressive estimated 0.5 MITFUC (Made It The Fuck Up Coefficient), which far exceeds the usual standards in rationalist prophecy work (1.0 MITFUC).
The remainder of the parameters use previously-published trends about compute power and costs for vision and language ML models. These are combined using arbitrary probability distributions to develop a prediction for when computers will ascend to godhood.
Epoch is currently asking for .64 million in additional funding. This is equivalent to the lifetime incomes of about 25 currently-living Ugandans, whereas singularity prophecies could save 100 trillion hypothetical human lives from the evil robot god, once again demonstrating the incredible efficiency of the EA approach to charity.
[edited to update inaccurate estimates about lifetime incomes in Uganda, fix link errors]
So they got .96M already – that’s probably like 6 full time staff at most? Do you know how many rationalists that would torture if it was given directly to me?
Literally none of these are net positive “charities” in any way other than providing “jobs” to tech-space failures who are (personally) vastly overpaid already. You’ve missed this from dividing by Ugandan life-worths, of course, instead of annual income of “working” on “AI processing of surgical videos”.
Aside: If there is anything I trust an LLM to do, it’s surgery.
Paywalled and I’m too lazy to get around it, but this is a ludicrously bad estimate. Your typical Ugandan makes less than 200 USD a month. That’s 20 people’s lifetime income if you assume they’re earning that for 40 years.
Typically this kind of systematic bias comes when the stats website collects data from glassdoor or another western jobs board, which in a third world country will list the very “tip of the iceberg”, the kinds of jobs which pay 10 times the average salary.
This discourse around “scaling laws”, as something of more than ephemeral technical relevance is hilarious btw, cuz in industry its understood by everyone for obvious reasons that they are invalidated by modelling progress.
Want a simple example of what I mean? Convolutional networks work for images cuz of a very strong prior (convolution) that fits the actual distribution of image data.
If in some world everyone was using fully-connected neural networks for images and having some ludicrous expense as the image resolution grows, that is now your “scaling law”.
But now someone invents convolutions – and the new situation will not just be “all our models are more efficient”, it will be an asymptotically slower growth of compute needed – cuz of ur innovation of convolving.
In the same way, new network architectures with good robust priors for i.e. language modelling or reasoning means wow now all your “scaling laws”, are invalidated cuz we don’t use that kind of model anymore.
I think these people have inadvertently created a really interesting cultural moment with all the AI millenarianism stuff. Will be fun to look at in a couple years
fantastic to see Make A Wish still being a more efficient charity than EA’s little favourites
I found a beta chart for the next iteration of the prophecy:
https://imgur.com/EsPs6x5