2024 June EA Updates
Inquiry concluded, 9 new charities and how does Open Phil prioritise?
Top Posts
The Charity Commission has concluded its inquiry into EVF UK - “the inquiry found that the trustees took appropriate steps to protect the charity’s funds and complied with their legal duties acting diligently and quickly following the collapse of FTX.”
Introducing Hive: A rebrand for Impactful Animal Advocacy
AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at Open Philanthropy
Emily Oehlsen - Philanthropic Cause Prioritisation (In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Emily looks at how Open Philanthropy assesses importance,
neglectedness and tractability in practice)
Tom Kalil is launching Renaissance Philanthropy to help philanthropists support science, technology and innovation
UK Government - £8.5 million research funding for AI safety testing
Presenting nine new charities - a record for the AIM (CE) Incubation Program
Marisa, the co-founder of EA Anywhere, has passed away
Conferences
29th June - EA Brazil Summit
5th-7th July - EAGxUtrecht
16-18th August - EAGxToronto
6-7th September - EA Nigeria Summit
7-8th September - EAGxBerkeley
September - Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk
13-15th September - EAGxBerlin
1st-3rd November - EAG Boston
Meta
Announcing La bisagra de la historia, a Spanish-speaking podcast
AE Studios - Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research surveys
Consultants for Impact (formerly the EA Consulting Network) launched a new website
Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola have a new book - EA and the Human Mind: The Clash Between Impact and Intuition
Jamie Harris - Lessons from two years of talent search pilots
EA Survey: Cause Prioritisation
Richard Y Chappell - Beneficentric Virtue Ethics
An invitation to the Berlin EA co-working space TEAMWORK
Jessica McCurdy - Potential Pitfalls in University EA Community Building
ALTER Israel - 2024 Mid-Year Update
Elizabeth - Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow
Effective Giving
5 things you’ve got wrong about the Giving What We Can Pledge
Brad West - Introducing the Profit for Good Blog: Transforming Business for Charity
Careers
Talent identification as an underappreciated career option
Probably Good launched a new job board
Joe Hill - The wealth of nations - should you work in the Treasury?
Tatiana K. Nesic Skuratova & Joseph Lemien - Hiring non-EA Talent: Pros & Cons
Open Philanthropy Day in the Life: Harshdeep Singh, Program Associate, Farm Animal Welfare
Grants
Open Philanthropy added 45 grants for $26m to their database
$12.7m - Global Health & Development
$5.7m - Hospital for Sick Children – Malaria Vaccine Research and Preclinical Development
$3.5m - KU Leuven — Influenza Antiviral Research
$1.3m - University of Oxford — Hepatitis C Challenge Model
$680k - Peterson Institute for International Economics — Indian Economic Policy Reform
$420k - Clinton Health Access Initiative — Aid Efficacy Support
$6.1m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$1.4m - Simon Institute for Longterm Governance
$1.1m - Safe AI Forum
$830k - Institute for AI Policy and Strategy
$4.7m - Animal Welfare
$1.8m - European Institute for Animal Law & Policy
$830k - Wageningen University — Wild-Caught Fish Welfare
$810k - Compassion in World Farming
$1.6m - Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building
$790k - Giving What We Can
$150k - Innovation Policy
EA Infrastructure Fund: March 2024 recommendations
Global Development
For more in depth updates I also write the Global Development & EA newsletter.
Open Philanthropy - Cool Things Our GHW Grantees Have Done in 2023
R&D for neglected diseases returns $405 for every dollar spent
Dean Spears - Ask me questions about my 80,000 hours podcast on preventing neonatal deaths with Kangaroo Mother Care
Hauke Hillebrandt - GDP per capita in 2050
Supriya - Introducing Ansh: A Charity Entrepreneurship Incubated Charity
Against a Happiness Ceiling: Replicating Killingsworth & Kahneman
Saloni Dattani - New polio vaccines are key to preventing outbreaks and achieving eradication
80,000 Hours podcast - Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems
Center for Global Development appoints Rachel Glennerster as new president
Todd Moss - How can new philanthropy help end energy poverty?
Ryan Briggs - “what EA can contribute to established areas like development studies”
Conflicts drive new record of 75.9 million people living in internal displacement
Stan Pinsent - A Neglected Crisis: Perinatal Mental Illness in LMICs
Ryan Briggs - “When you strip out the branding of EA and just ask development studies professors if they agree with EA ideas, they overwhelmingly do.”
Animal Welfare
For more comprehensive animal news I recommend Impactful Animal Advocacy.
Aaron Boddy - Shrimp Paste and Animal Welfare
Michael St Jules - The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations
Announcing UK Voters for Animals
Animal Welfare is now enshrined in the Belgian Constitution
Keyvan Mostafavi - Fighting animal suffering: beyond the number of animals killed
Modelling the outcomes of animal welfare interventions: One possible approach to the trade-offs between subjective experiences
Corentin D. Biteau - Announcing the Launch of the National Observatory on Insect Farming in France - ONEI
Farmed Animal Welfare Incubator - Southeast Asia
AI for Animals with the latest updates on AI news relevant to animal welfare
Introducing Senti - Animal Ethics AI Assistant
A Suchy - 89% of cage-free egg commitments with deadlines of 2023 or earlier have been fulfilled
Michael St Jules - The scale of animal agriculture
Alternative Proteins
GFI - The State of Global Policy on Alternative Proteins
Kenny Torella - Why Florida and Alabama banned alt-proteins
From Kilograms to Tons: The Scaling Challenge for Cultivated Meat
How can alternative protein companies overcome infrastructure and funding challenges to scale up production?
BioRaptor and Aleph Farms use AI to lower the costs of cultivated beef
Global Catastrophic Risks
Benjamin Todd
Updates on the EA catastrophic risk landscape
Nuclear security seems like an interesting funding gap
80,000 Hours - New career review: Nuclear weapons safety and security
Benjamin Hilton - Where are all the nuclear experts?
“For EA Global closing session, we were able to hear from two survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”
Biosecurity
GCBR Organisation Updates - my recommendation for updates on biosecurity
Matthew Rendall - Pandemic apathy
A comprehensive visual map of the entities that monitor biological threats across the U.S. federal government
Kelsey Piper - How the White House just made the world a little safer from biorisks
GCBR Organization Updates - May 2024
Nordic Biosecurity Group - a network of students and professionals interested in the Nordic Biosecurity field
New NAO preprint: Indoor air sampling for detection of viral nucleic acids
Environment
Effective Environmentalism newsletter
Jeffrey Heninger - Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan
Hannah Ritchie
Bezos Earth Fund Announces $100 Million for AI Solutions to Tackle Climate Change and Nature Loss
Giving Green’s climate regranting fund receives $10 million anonymous donation
IEA - Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions
Systematic review and meta-analysis of ex-post evaluations on the effectiveness of carbon pricing
Book Summary: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
More than one in five cars sold worldwide this year is expected to be electric
Ember - Global Electricity Review 2024
Grow demand for carbon removal as a Stripe Climate Fellow
AI Safety
For more regular updates I recommend the AI Safety Newsletter.
The Survival and Flourishing Fund is creating two special tracks for S-process applications that specifically target values, called fairness and freedom
UK Government - Frontier AI Safety Commitments, AI Seoul Summit 2024
Matt Clifford - Introducing def/acc at Entrepreneur First
Benjamin Todd - AI stocks could crash. And that could have implications for AI safety
Jaan Tallinn's 2023 Philanthropy Overview - $44M worth of endpoint grants
Science - Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress
Euan McLean
Big Picture AI Safety: Introduction
What mistakes has the AI safety movement made?
MATS Winter 2023-24 Retrospective
Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams
Amazon and Meta join the Frontier Model Forum to promote AI safety
Anthropic - Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model
Condor Global Southeast Asia - 6-day AI safety career accelerator camp in Manila
Launching applications for AI Safety Careers Course India 2024
Google DeepMind - Introducing the Frontier Safety Framework
Spring 2024 updated report on State of AI Safety in China
Securing AI Model Weights: Q&A with Sella Nevo
AISafety.com – Resources for AI Safety
80,000 Hours - Fill out this census of everyone interested in reducing catastrophic AI risks
AI & Communication
Ozzie Gooen - What's Going on With OpenAI's Messaging?
New survey on worldwide public opinion about AI
Articles about recent OpenAI departures
A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence (for former employees of frontier labs)
MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy
Sigal Samuel - Company insiders explain why safety-conscious employees are leaving
Helen Toner Ted Talk - How to govern AI — even if it's hard to predict
"AI Safety for Fleshy Humans" an AI Safety explainer by Nicky Case
Garrison - Podcast with Yoshua Bengio on Why AI Labs are “Playing Dice with Humanity’s Future”
Shakeel Hashim - Transformer - weekly briefing on AI safety and related areas
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh discussing AI alignment on one of China's leading TV chat shows
AI Governance
AI labs fail to uphold safety commitments to UK AISI
Inspect, a framework for large language model evaluations created by the UK AI Safety Institute
Conor Griffin - The AI Policy Atlas
Ian Hogarth - Fourth progress report on the AI Safety Institute
Marius Hobbhahn - The AI Act compliance deadline: harnessing evaluations for innovation and accountability
Imane Bello - Reflections on the Seoul Safety Summit
AI firms mustn’t govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI’s board
In DC, a new wave of AI lobbyists gains the upper hand
Zvi - Q&A on proposed SB 1047
Zach Stein-Perlman - Maybe Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust is powerless
Progress, Innovation & Metascience
80,000 Hours podcast - Matt Clancy on whether science is good
RoRI is partnering with the Center for Open Science to bring the Metascience 2025 conference to London
Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape
Accelerator For Innovation & Research Funding Experimentation has been launched
The Simon Abundance Index 2024 finds Earth’s resources 509% more plentiful than in 1980
Nature - Pay researchers to spot errors in published papers
Maxwell Tabarrok - Tax Cuts and Innovation - an underrated metascience policy
For academics interested in synthesising and communicating research for non-specialists - Open Philanthropy may be able to offer financial support (announcement point 3)
Clearer Thinking - 10 Times Scientists Admitted They Were Wrong, and What You Can Learn from Them
Matt Clancy - When the Robots Take Your Job
Jacob Trefethen - 10 U.S. policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies
The 2024 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive - Apply by June 7th
Benjamin Reinhardt - Getting materials out of the lab
Longtermism
Toby Ord - Robust longterm comparisons
Eli Dourado - A beginner’s guide to sociopolitical collapse
Liv Boeree podcast with Samo Burja - Why did past civilisations collapse, and what can we learn from them to save our own?
Biotech
Decoding Bio Snapshot 2024 - looking at some of the most impactful papers in the tech/bio space
Science - AI & medical forecasting
An AI system that warned physicians to check on high-risk patients resulted in a 31% reduction in overall deaths among this group
Nature - Semaglutide compared with other anti-obesity medications is associated with a 50-56% lower risk for both the incidence and recurrence of alcohol use disorder for a 12-month follow-up period
Podcast on the AI revolution in biology with Amelie Schreiber
China approves genetically modified wheat crops
Ozempic is coming for the alcohol and tobacco industries next
AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules
How successful are AI-discovered drugs in clinical trials? A first analysis and emerging lessons
“In Phase I we find AI-discovered molecules have an 80–90% success rate, substantially higher than historic industry averages”
Other Causes
Announcing a $6,000,000 endowment for NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy
Leah Pierson - Survey: bioethicists' views on bioethical issues
Ozy Brennan - On John Woolman (Early Abolitionist)
Rhys Southan - Summary: The weight of suffering by Andreas Mogensen
S-Risks: Fates Worse Than Extinction
Inside the U.S. and Panama’s long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease
80,000 Hours - Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist
Kuhan - The US Presidential Election is Tractable, Very Important, and Urgent
Nick Cowen - How the war on drunk driving was won
Nick Whitaker & J. Zachary Mazlish - Why prediction markets aren’t popular
Benjamin Todd - The market plausibly expects AI software to create trillions of dollars of value by 2027
Vox - What if canceling people’s medical debt doesn’t help them?
Emergent Ventures, 34th cohort
Is the number of natural disasters increasing?
ESA Vigil will monitor the Sun to protect vital infrastructure on Earth, in space as well as space explorers from its violent outbursts
Trammel - Notes on risk compensation
Clearer Thinking Podcast - Measuring everything that matters (with Doug Hubbard)
Clearer Thinking - Problem-Solving Techniques That Work For All Types of Challenges
Book Summary: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Benjamin Todd - Project idea: AI for epistemics
Summary: Against the singularity hypothesis
Stories & EA Around the World
kta - My Lament to EA
Being a young person in EA: my journey into the EA community
Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek have launched a podcast, their first guest was Daniel Kahneman
Elizabeth Klugh - A Scar Worth Bearing: My Improbable Story of Kidney Donation
80k After Hours with Julian Hazell
Ben Romney on reaching the milestone of donating $100,000 to charity
GWWC - 80-year-old Bob Layne thought others should know about effective giving. So he made it happen
Laura Sofía Castro on leaving IPA to found a new charity with AIM
Humanitix has donated $4 million to The Life You Can Save
Good News
Belize, Jamaica, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are the latest Caribbean countries to be certified for the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis
Maternal deaths have halved in the last 35 years
