My name is Mikhail Samin (diminutive Misha, @Mihonarium on Twitter, @misha in Telegram).
Humanity's future can be huge and awesome; losing it would mean our lightcone (and maybe the universe) losing most of its potential value.
My research is currently focused on AI governance and improving the understanding of AI and AI risks among stakeholders. I also have takes on what seems to me to be the very obvious shallow stuff about the technical AI notkilleveryoneism; but many AI Safety researchers told me our conversations improved their understanding of the alignment problem.
I believe a capacity for global regulation is necessary to mitigate the risks posed by future general AI systems. I'm happy to talk to policymakers and researchers about ensuring AI benefits society.
I took the Giving What We Can pledge to donate at least 10% of my income for the rest of my life or until the day I retire (why?).
In the past, I've launched the most funded crowdfunding campaign in the history of Russia (it was to print HPMOR! we printed 21 000 copies =63k books) and founded audd.io, which allowed me to donate >$100k to EA causes, including >$60k to MIRI.
[Less important: I've also started a project to translate 80,000 Hours, a career guide that helps to find a fulfilling career that does good, into Russian. The impact and the effectiveness aside, for a year, I was the head of the Russian Pastafarian Church: a movement claiming to be a parody religion, with 200 000 members in Russia at the time, trying to increase separation between religious organisations and the state. I was a political activist and a human rights advocate. I studied relevant Russian and international law and wrote appeals that won cases against the Russian government in courts; I was able to protect people from unlawful police action. I co-founded the Moscow branch of the "Vesna" democratic movement, coordinated election observers in a Moscow district, wrote dissenting opinions for members of electoral commissions, helped Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, helped Telegram with internet censorship circumvention, and participated in and organized protests and campaigns. The large-scale goal was to build a civil society and turn Russia into a democracy through nonviolent resistance. This goal wasn't achieved, but some of the more local campaigns were successful. That felt important and was also mostly fun- except for being detained by the police. I think it's likely the Russian authorities will imprison me if I ever visit Russia.]
Posts
Wikitag Contributions
Oh no, OpenAI hasn’t been meaningfully advancing the frontier for a couple of months, scaling must be dead!
What is the easiest among problems you’re 95% confident AI won’t be able to solve by EOY 2025?
I refer to the second letter.
I claim that a responsible frontier AI company would’ve behaved very differently from Anthropic. In particular, the letter said basically “we don’t think the bill is that good and don’t really think it should be passed” more than it said “please sign”. This is very different from your personal support for the bill; you indeed communicated “please sign”.
Sam Altman has also been “supportive of new regulation in principle”. These words sadly don’t align with either OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s lobbying efforts, which have been fairly similar. The question is, was Anthropic supportive of SB-1047 specifically? I expect people to not agree Anthropic was after reading the second letter.
Since this seems to be a crux, I propose a bet to @Zac Hatfield-Dodds (or anyone else at Anthropic): someone shows random people in San-Francisco Anthropic’s letter to Newsom on SB-1047. I would bet that among the first 20 who fully read at least one page, over half will say that Anthropic’s response to SB-1047 is closer to presenting the bill as 51% good and 49% bad than presenting it as 95% good and 5% bad.
Zac, at what odds would you take the bet?
(I would be happy to discuss the details.)
There was a specific bet, which Yudkowsky is likely about to win. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer
Three years later, I think the post was right, and the pushback was wrong.
People who disagreed with this post lost their bets.
My understanding is that when the post was written, Anthropic had already had the first Claude, so the knowledge was available to the community.
A month after this post was retracted, ChatGPT was released.
Plausibly, "the EA community" would've been in a better place if it started to publicly and privately use its chips for AI x-risk advocacy and talking about the short timelines.
Do you think if an AI with random goals that doesn’t get acausally paid to preserve us takes over, then there’s a meaningful chance there will be some humans around in 100 years? What does it look like?
“we believe its benefits likely outweigh its costs” is “it was a bad bill and now it’s likely net-positive”, not exactly unequivocally supporting it. Compare that even to the language in calltolead.org.
Edit: AFAIK Anthropic lobbied against SSP-like requirements in private.
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Thanks for the reply!
after talking to Claude for a couple of hours asking it to reflect: