Unfortunately, most of the orgs themselves don't care about/understand existential risk either. Most of the ones that do have pivoted to advocacy work. There are very few who actually understand the core problems and are actively working on them.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but it has to be said. This seems like the exact opposite approach we should be taking. The alignment field has catastrophically failed by every measurement, and hasn't produced anything viable since RLHF. Whatever context these people have, it seems to be the wrong kind. “Seniors” in the field should not be looked up to as mentors to emulate, but as cautionary tales for new entries of how your thinking, your decisions, and your actions can all go horribly wrong.

This seems to exemplify the problem I have with most EA organizations. They are often run by people who are young, with great talent, but no serious prior experience. I don't assume malevolence from Zach, and think the most probable explanation is that he (like many at EA orgs) didn't know the basics about what not to do while running a company. I don't say that to be mean. But anyone with experience would understand immediately that this constituted sexual harassment under US Law and violated the Worker Protection Act. I fear EAs are prone to do everything their own way, without thought of why existing norms and structures are there in the first place. This is one of the reasons other companies often promote by seniority. They have the experience and understanding needed to see the obvious. This is the sort of thing that would be so extremely obvious to someone with decades of experience. Do other companies have worse scandals? Yes. But I think the number of scandals in EA orgs that surround "not seeing or doing the obvious thing" is much higher than average.

"GPT-5 training is probably starting around now." I'm pretty sure its already been trained, and they're now running evals.

Judging from all the comments in agreement, from people who probably have no political power to actually implement these things, but who might have been useful toward actually solving the problem, this pivot is probably a net negative. You will probably fail at having much of a political influence, but succeed at dissuading people from doing technical research.

Wouldn't Sam selling large amounts of chips to OAI's direct competitors constitute a conflict of interest? It also doesn't seem like something he would want to do, since he seems very devoted to OAI's success, for better or worse. Why would he want to increase decentralization?

I imagine Sam's mental model is the bigger lead OpenAI has over others, the more control they can have at pivotal moments, and (in his mind) the safer things will be. Everyone else is quickly catching up in terms of capability, but if OpenAI has special chips their competitors don't have access to, then they have an edge. Obviously, this can't really be distinguished from Sam just trying to maximize his own ambitions, but it doesn't necessarily undercut safety goals either.

This is useful, but shouldn't there be projects to breakdown the pipeline that could enable engineered pandemics? This seems the highest risk among all possibilities.

Should the US start mass-producing hazmat suits? So that, in the event of an engineered pandemic, the spread of the disease can be prevented, while still being able to maintain critical infrastructure/delivery of basic necessities.