Ajeya Cotra

And then in 2024, you started leading the AI technical grant making.

And then I guess towards the end of that year, you decided to take four months off and take a sabbatical.

Tell us about all of that.

So in 2022, you did this huge burst of grantmaking, I guess, trying to help a bunch of refugees from the FTX Foundation, basically.

But then you thought, I guess you would have noticed that there's probably an overarching strategy behind all the grants that you were making.

And you were like, we need to have a bigger picture idea of what we're actually trying to push on and why.

It sounds like you find it unpleasant or anxiety-inducing to make grants where you don't have a deep understanding of what the money, or I guess not so much what the money is being spent on, but you don't have a personal opinion about whether it's likely to bear fruit.

Is that right?

Yeah, it's maybe worth explaining why it is that OpenPhil doesn't aspire to get to that level of confidence with most of its grants.

Why is that?

So in 2024, you actually took on responsibility for this whole portfolio.

But I guess your personal philosophy of how to operate is somewhat in tension with how OpenPhil as a whole is tending to operate.

So what did you end up doing in the role?

So it's sort of the stuff that we were talking about earlier where you're trying to get an early heads up about whether the AIs are going to be really effective agents.

I guess 2023, we were really unsure how that was going to go.

It seemed like agents in general have been a bit disappointing or it hasn't progressed as much as I expected or probably as you expected.

But at that point, it seemed like, well, maybe by this point, they'll be just operating computers completely as well as humans.

And you really wanted to, I guess, know if that was a future we were heading for.

So I guess halfway through 2024, you started feeling pretty burnt out or you wanted to take a bit of a break.

Why was that?