He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY’s potential and achievements.
Innovation in any area is a team effort. In his efforts to create friendly AI, EY has at least one huge accomplishment: creating a thriving organization devoted to creating friendly AI. Realistically, this accomplishment is almost certainly more significant than any set of code he alone could have written.
Not by itself (unless you happen to be Peter Thiel). It would become double counting evidence if you, say, counted both the information contained in Peter Thiel’s opinion and then also counted the SIAI’s economic resources.
He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY’s potential and achievements.
It shows marketing skill. That doesn’t necessarily indicate competence in other fields—and this is an area where competence is important. Especially so if you want to participate in the race—and have some chance of actually winning it.
Indeed. Antonino Zichichi is a far worse physicist than what pretty much any Italian layman believes, even though it was him who got the Gran Sasso laboratories funded.
He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY’s potential and achievements.
That’s a huge achievement. But don’t forget that he wasn’t able to convince him that the SIAI is the most important charity:
In February 2006, Thiel provided $100,000 of matching funds to back the Singularity Challenge donation drive of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
vs.
In September 2006, Thiel announced that he would donate $3.5 million to foster anti-aging research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation.
...
In May 2007, Thiel provided half of the $400,000 matching funds for the annual Singularity Challenge donation drive.
vs.
On April 15, 2008, Thiel pledged $500,000 to the new Seasteading Institute, directed by Patri Friedman, whose mission is “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems”.
I wouldn’t exactly say that he was able to convince him of risks from AI.
And the logical next question… what is the greatest technical accomplishment of anyone in this thriving organization? Ideally in the area of AI. Putting together a team is an accomplishment proportional to what we can anticipate the team to accomplish. If there is anyone on this team that has done good things in the area of AI, some credit would go to EY for convincing that person to work on friendly AI.
Eh, it looks like we’re becoming the New Hippies or the New New Age. The “sons of Bayes and 4chan” instead of “the sons of Marx and Coca-Cola”. Lots of theorizing, lots of self-improvement and wisdom-generation, some of which is quite genuine, lots of mutual reassuring that it’s the rest of the world that’s insane and of breaking free of oppressive conventions… but under all the foam surprisingly little is actually getting done, apparently.
However, humanity might look back on us forty years from now and say: “those guys were pretty awesome, they were so avant la lettre, of course, the stuff they thought was so mindblowing is commonplace now, and lots of what they did was pointless flailing, but we still owe them a lot”.
Perhaps I am being overly optimistic. At least we’re having awesome fun together whenever we meet up. It’s something.
He got Peter Thiel to donate $1.1 million to the SIAI, which you should take as a sign of EY’s potential and achievements.
Innovation in any area is a team effort. In his efforts to create friendly AI, EY has at least one huge accomplishment: creating a thriving organization devoted to creating friendly AI. Realistically, this accomplishment is almost certainly more significant than any set of code he alone could have written.
Isn’t that potentially double-counting evidence?
Not by itself (unless you happen to be Peter Thiel). It would become double counting evidence if you, say, counted both the information contained in Peter Thiel’s opinion and then also counted the SIAI’s economic resources.
It shows marketing skill. That doesn’t necessarily indicate competence in other fields—and this is an area where competence is important. Especially so if you want to participate in the race—and have some chance of actually winning it.
Indeed. Antonino Zichichi is a far worse physicist than what pretty much any Italian layman believes, even though it was him who got the Gran Sasso laboratories funded.
That’s a huge achievement. But don’t forget that he wasn’t able to convince him that the SIAI is the most important charity:
vs.
...
vs.
I wouldn’t exactly say that he was able to convince him of risks from AI.
And the logical next question… what is the greatest technical accomplishment of anyone in this thriving organization? Ideally in the area of AI. Putting together a team is an accomplishment proportional to what we can anticipate the team to accomplish. If there is anyone on this team that has done good things in the area of AI, some credit would go to EY for convincing that person to work on friendly AI.
Eh, it looks like we’re becoming the New Hippies or the New New Age. The “sons of Bayes and 4chan” instead of “the sons of Marx and Coca-Cola”. Lots of theorizing, lots of self-improvement and wisdom-generation, some of which is quite genuine, lots of mutual reassuring that it’s the rest of the world that’s insane and of breaking free of oppressive conventions… but under all the foam surprisingly little is actually getting done, apparently.
However, humanity might look back on us forty years from now and say: “those guys were pretty awesome, they were so avant la lettre, of course, the stuff they thought was so mindblowing is commonplace now, and lots of what they did was pointless flailing, but we still owe them a lot”.
Perhaps I am being overly optimistic. At least we’re having awesome fun together whenever we meet up. It’s something.