I think there’s a pretty important distinction between direct usefulness and this sort of diffuse public good that is very hard to attribute. Things with large but diffuse impact are much more often underincentivized and often mostly done as a labor of love. In general, the more you think an organization is shaped by incentives that are hard to fight against, the more you should expect diffusely impactful things to be relatively neglected.
I have a model whereby ~all very successful large companies require a leader with vision, who is able to understand incentives and nonetheless take long-term action that isn’t locally rewarded. YC startups constantly talk about long-term investments into culture and hiring and onboarding processes that are costly in (I’d guess) the 3-12 month time-frame but extremely valuable in the 1-5 year time frame.
Saying that a system is heavily shaped by incentives doesn’t seem to me to imply that the system is heavily short-sighted. Companies like Amazon and Facebook are of course heavily shaped by incentives yet have quite long-term thinking in their leaders, who often do things that look like locally wasted effort because they have a vision of how it will pay off years down the line.
Speaking about the local political situation, I think safety investment from AI capabilities companies can be thought of as investing into problems that will come up in the future. As a more cynical hypothesis, I think it can also be usefully thought of as a worthwhile political ploy to attract talent and look responsible to regulators and intelligentsia.
(Added: Bottom-line: Following incentives does not mean short-sighted.)
I have a model whereby ~all very successful large companies require a leader with vision, who is able to understand incentives and nonetheless take long-term action that isn’t locally rewarded. YC startups constantly talk about long-term investments into culture and hiring and onboarding processes that are costly in (I’d guess) the 3-12 month time-frame but extremely valuable in the 1-5 year time frame.
Saying that a system is heavily shaped by incentives doesn’t seem to me to imply that the system is heavily short-sighted. Companies like Amazon and Facebook are of course heavily shaped by incentives yet have quite long-term thinking in their leaders, who often do things that look like locally wasted effort because they have a vision of how it will pay off years down the line.
Speaking about the local political situation, I think safety investment from AI capabilities companies can be thought of as investing into problems that will come up in the future. As a more cynical hypothesis, I think it can also be usefully thought of as a worthwhile political ploy to attract talent and look responsible to regulators and intelligentsia.
(Added: Bottom-line: Following incentives does not mean short-sighted.)