The review’s findings rejected the idea that any kind of ai safety concern necessitated Mr Altman’s replacement. In fact, WilmerHale found that “the prior board’s decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI's finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners.”

Note that Toner did not make claims regarding product safety, security, the pace of development, OAI's finances, or statements to investors (the board is not investors), customers, or business partners (the board are not business partners). She said he was not honest to the board.

Sorry for the noncentral point...

Indeed, one can already find quite high-quality educational videos from YouTube. 3Blue1Brown has received near-universal acclaim (at least in my circles), and sets a lower bound for how good videos one can make. (I also bet that, unlike for many Hollywood movies, the budget for 3Blue1Brown videos is less than $10 million per hour.)

I actually don't think 3Blue1Brown is all that great an example here. How many people, after watching his essence of calculus videos, could find a derivative or an integral of a reasonably complicated function? How many, after watching his linear algebra series, could find the eigenvectors & values of a 3x3 matrix? 3Blue1Brown seems very much like good supplementary material to me, or good as a first high-level approach to a math area.

I'd say a better example for "pedagogy done extraordinarily well at the high-school math level" is Khan Academy. At least, it was 7-8 years ago, and I expect even if it has returned a bit to the mean, LLMs are vastly improving the experience, which I know they've been using, and is a big step up over the alternative. Someone whose gone through the Khan Academy lessons on calculus or linear algebra has a far higher chance of correctly performing a derivative or an integral, or finding the eigenvectors & values of a 3x3 matrix.

ETA in the undergraduate & beginning graduate math level, textbooks become the things which are professionalized (but not those recommending textbooks to you), and in the advanced graduate level of course there is no professionalization in pedagogy.

A market on the subject: https://manifold.markets/GarrettBaker/which-of-the-names-below-will-i-rec?r=R2FycmV0dEJha2Vy

Not quite, helpful video, summary:

They use a row of spinning fins mid-way through their rockets to indirectly steer missiles by creating turbulent vortices which interact with the tail-fins and add an extra oomfph to the steering mechanism. The exact algorithm is classified, for obvious reasons.

There is a mystery which many applied mathematicians have asked themselves: Why is linear algebra so over-powered?

An answer I like was given in Lloyd Trefethen's book An Applied Mathematician's Apology, in which he writes (my summary):

Everything in the real world is described fully by non-linear analysis. In order to make such systems simpler, we can linearize (differentiate) them, and use a first or second order approximation, and in order to represent them on a computer, we can discretize them, which turns analytic techniques into algebraic ones. Therefore we've turned our non-linear analysis into linear algebra.

Relevant market

Do you think the final big advance happens within or with-out labs?

I don't know the exact article that convinced me, but I bet this summary of the history of economic thought on the subject is a good place to start, which I have skimmed, and seems to cover the main points with citations.

Interesting lens! Though I'm not sure if this is fair -- the largest things that are done tend to get done through governments, whether those things are good or bad. If you blame catastrophes like Mao's famine or Hitler's genocide on governments, you should also credit things like slavery abolition and vaccination and general decline of violence in civilized society to governments too.

I do mostly^[1] credit such things to governments, but the argument is about whether companies or governments are more liable to take on very large tail risks. Not about whether governments are generally good or bad. It may be that governments just like starting larger projects than corporations. But in that case, I think the claim that a greater percentage of those end in catastrophe than similarly large projects started by corporations still looks good.

I will push back on democratic in the sense I think Linch is pushing the term being actually all that good a property for cosmically important orgs. See Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter, and the literature around [Social-desirability bias](Social-desirability bias) for reasons why, which I'm sure Linch is familiar with, but I notice is not mentioned.

I also claim that most catastrophes through both recent and long-ago history have been caused by governments, not just in the trivial sense, but also if we normalize by amount of stuff done. A good example everyone right now should be familiar with is qualified immunity, and the effects it has on irresponsible policing. The fact is we usually hold our companies to much higher standards than our governments (or do we just have more control over the incentives of our companies than our governments). It is also strange that the example Linch gives for a bad company is Blackwater, which while bad, is... about par-for-the-course when it comes to CIA projects.

I note too the America-centric bias with all of these examples & comparisons. Maybe the American government is just too incompetent compared to others, and we should instead embed the project within France or Norway.

There's a general narrative that basic research is best done in government/academia, but is this true? The academia end seems possibly true in the 20th century, most discoveries were made by academics. But there was also a significant contribution by folks at research labs started by monopolies of the period (most notably Bell Laboratories). Though this seems like the kind of thing which could turn out to be false going forward, as our universities become more bloated, and we kill off our monopolies. But in either case, I don't know why Linch thinks quality basic research will be done by the government? People like bringing up the Apollo program & Manhattan project, but both of those were quality projects due to their applied research, not their basic research which was all laid down ahead of time. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but does anyone have good case studies? CERN comes to mind, but of course for projects that just require governments to throw massive amounts of money at a problem, government does well. AGI is plausibly like this, but alignment is not (though more money would be nice).

Government also tends to go slow, which I think is the strongest argument in favor of doing AGI inside a government. But also, man I don't trust government to implement an alignment solution if such a solution is invented during the intervening time. I'm imagining trying to convince a stick-in-the-ass bureaucrat fancying himself a scientist philosopher, whose only contribution to the project was politicking at a few important senators to thereby get himself enough authority to stand in the way of anyone changing anything about the project, who thinks he knows the solution to alignment that he is in fact wrong, and he should use so-and-so proven strategy, or such-and-such ensemble approach instead. Maybe a cynical picture, but one I'd bet resonates with those working to improve government processes.

I'd be interested to hear how Austin has updated regarding Sam's trustworthiness over the past few days.