akash 🔸
Bio
Participation6
I have a master's in Information Science. Before switching to the master's, I was a Ph.D. student in Planetary Science where I used optimization models to physically characterize asteroids (including potentially hazardous ones).
Historically, my most time-intensive EA involvement has been organizing Tucson Effective Altruism, the EA university group at the University of Arizona. If you are a movement builder, let's get in touch!
I am broadly interested in economic growth, abundant futures, and earning-to-give for animal welfare. Always happy to chat about anything EA!
How others can help me
Career-related:
- I am looking for co-founders who are eager to dive into for-profit entrepreneurship. Please message me here or on LinkedIn, and we can chat and see if we would be a good match!
Other:
- If you are an EA University group organizer, I would be interested in learning about post-introductory fellowship activities you run
- Chatting about different visions of avant-garde EA
How I can help others
- I can share my experience running an EA group at a US public university
- I can share the reasons I chose to attend graduate school, information about the application process, the state of academia, and whether EAs should consider this an option
- I consider myself decently well-versed with core EA ideas, and I'm happy to chat with newer EAs and point them to the right resources/people
- I can give people insights into my career planning process, key decisions I have taken and why (like switching out of my Ph.D.), and plans I have for the future
- My experience upskilling in AI Safety
- Specifically, I am happy to chat about paper replications, projects, and courses (such as ARENA) that I pursued independently
- Also happy to chat why I think more EAs should consider non-AIS careers paths
- My experiences "vibe coding" an application & the SF start up scene
Posts 2
Comments110
I made claude do some quick maths:
Apparently, even $1 invested into Situational Awareness LP 6 months ago is worth $1.78 now. Totally possible he is not a savant whisperer and had enough knowledge and connections to make great bets, but the bets are still paying off. Time will tell if their hedging strategy is actually sound or just lucky.
But I don't think this is comparable to FTX or contains any lessons for the EA community. Is Situational Awareness LP an EA venture? I could be wrong but I don't think so. I have always thought of it as "oh I guess Aschenbrenner is doing his own thing, cool."
However, it is objectively nuts to put a 24-year-old with no experience in charge of a $50B hedge fund.
? It is his fund. He started it.
I feel with the FTX and rat culture reflection, you are reading into the situation too much.
The losses, as you pointed out, happened due to highly leveraged bets. He didn't expect memory stocks to bleed as much as they did. Besides, it is possible that the fund will survive because his core thesis has paid off exceptionally well so far. He also has a rumored $5B equity stake in a certain large AI company.
Tough time for Situational Awareness LP, but I hope they make it!
Which sources of funding would you recommend for those interested in generalist EA community building? 2/3 examples are AIS-related for which there are overwhelming sums of funding available (and they are doing work that is better not done at CEA anyway).
I was beyond excited to read NEST's introductory announcement last month. Curious how they are funded, because I thought OP is no longer super interested in EA community building.
2026, the year vegan baking was solved!
On a more serious note:
- "At $24 for the equivalent of 45 egg whites ($0.53 each) it's more expensive than buying conventional ($0.21 each) or organic ($0.33) egg whites, but not massively so."
I would be interested in an econ person's take on how they predict the price to change over time. Intuitively, I feel that $0.53 is a promising number for a newly launched product, and if demand increases, the price would plummet and make it the de-facto choice for many products that contain egg whites?
- I hope they do a good job of marketing it, an increasing number of people are negatively primed towards cultivated products.
They are not neglected problems compared to, say, direct cash transfers or farm animal welfare.