Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that is that. We're probably just talking about, probably talking about 10s of billions of that alone. They obviously won't all come immediately because they wouldn't want to sell their whole stake immediately. So there's a lot of funding. Again, I kind of think both of these things are true. There is scope to start new organizations. There's a lot of important gaps. But there are also orgs doing great work and you could just join them and try and multiply them. And I think entrepreneurial people are often a little bit biased against the second option because If you start an organization yourself, it feels much more satisfying because you get to be like, there was nothing and now I made this thing. Whereas just making another organization 5% more effective is harder to feel tangibly. But if that other organization is having a huge impact, then it can often be better to just throw yourself behind the thing that is working and double down on it. I would consider both paths. Founding is obviously difficult and most It's maybe not the thing for most people. So if you are that type of person who do it, then I think that's, it should be taken seriously. Yeah, there's an interesting thing about founding, like how possible is top down founding where you're just like, well, this idea I think is really important. I'm just going to go and build that thing. It seems to not work that well in the for profit sector. And I remember Y Combinator really encouraging us to, you know, like, the best companies just develop out of problems that you were solving for yourself or almost like side projects that you didn't think were a company and then you realized that actually were. I think that maybe applies more to for-profits because the space is so much more efficient and competitive. It's harder to spot an idea. Whereas I think in the nonprofit world, it's more possible to just be like, okay, there's this funder who wants to fund this thing. There's this important gap. I'm just going to fill this gap. And there's definitely been cases of people doing that. And if you're really motivated by the impact, you can actually put that into action. There's a couple of different organizations helping people who want to do this kind of thing now. There's one called Six Impact, which is an accelerator in this space. Maybe also worth mentioning for mid-career people, Successive, which just is to transition mid-career people into careers working on AI risk in some way. And also there's a lot of fellowships, like Horizon Fellowship transitions people into policy careers in one or two years. So if you're like a technical person now, but you're interested in policy, you could apply there and they can help you switch really quickly. 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.…

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