Ben Todd: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, cool. Shout out also to Halcyon as another network that I've seen with a very focused and not super scaled, but high success rate approach. They've also been pretty good, especially I think for mid-career people making moves into the AI space. Do you have a request for startups list? For the founders among us, are there kind of top priority gaps that you see? Yeah, there's, so Catalyze Impact, who I just mentioned, they have a meta list of all the other lists. So you could just go and check that out and then browse all of the 20 or so lists of project ideas they have there. And there's, yeah, there's a lot of ideas of the minutes. Yeah, I like none of, in terms of what most stands out. Yeah. One, I think you asked about if you have an AI application skill set, what's something valuable you could work on with that? And one broad area of things is if you think we're going to be facing these big risks, soon that are going to be caused by much more powerful AI, then one strategy you might want to take is think about how you can essentially use AI to address these problems because then your tools are getting better as the problems are getting more severe, they're growing in tandem. And one category of things there is using AI to improve epistemics, improve our understanding of what's happening, improve decision making. And there could be a lot of scope to build tools here. Could we have automated fact checking? Could we have automated looking at people's prediction track records, like different politicians and pundits and saying, well, you said all these things in the past, but like this fraction were actually correct. This could improve our discourse. And then another thing would be like government, like people in government are going to be relying more and more to make, to use AI to make decisions rapidly. They're going to have AI advice. especially if the world starts speeding up the pace of change, it might be hard to stay on top of things just with normal old human brains. And it would be nice if those people had AI advisors that weren't necessarily just developed by the companies that they're supposed to be monitoring, right? Ideally, that would be more impartial AI advice that we could check is designed from the ground up to do exactly what this government wants it to do. So there's this kind of AI chief of staff or AI decision advisor idea application, which yeah, is the kind of thing that the market might not build because there's not going to be that, you might be able to build a profit model around it, but the key application would be more of a non-profit application to these key government decision makers. So Fore Thoughts Research have written about this idea. So if you want to see more of the project ideas in this space, they have a couple of articles about it. As one kind of calibration point too for just how helpful AI can be on some of these things, I'll say, we'll put that in the show notes. And then the show notes these days are now fully AI generated, generally not even really reviewed by me, but they do tend to come out with a couple dozen links. So all of the organizations that we've mentioned, you're like the list of lists that you mentioned, I think that Claude will be able to find that with some help from the Brave Search API, I should say, and that all that stuff will be in there. And if you go check that out, know that I probably didn't look at it between now and the time that it hits the website, which means that there could be some errors in there. I wouldn't say you should trust it to be fully comprehensive or fully error-free, but that kind of scale of project, I'm confident enough now, just letting the AI run with, and it's clear that it's doing a pretty good job and adding value even to the point where I'm usually a bit precious about publishing AI stuff without a review, but at the helpful links level, it's reliable to the point where I let it fly. Do you think much, we've focused obviously very squarely on these big picture risks from AI and what to do about it. I know that you also have over time put a lot of thought into other ways to help people and the world and there's been 80,000 hours career guides for how to help the global poor and improve public health and improve animal welfare and all those sorts of things. If somebody is really interested in those topics, but also is developing an AI skill set, how much room do you think there is to go apply AI for those organizations that are executing already in those different domains? My guess would be that they probably have not caught up to the AI frontier or anywhere close in a lot of cases, although I could be wrong. What would you say is the state of just mundane opportunity to apply AI for mundane, but ideally well chosen causes and make a difference that way?…

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