Casey Noon

So right there, off the top, we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars potentially that are being earmarked for charity just by the eight co-founders of Anthropic.

Then you have this stock matching program, which, as you alluded to, not only offer to match employees who...

pledged a certain percentage of their stock to charity share for share, but matched them three to one in the case of some early employees.

And that just is creating like when you when you actually lay out the numbers, as Nan did in her post, like it is just staggering the amount of money like we are going to see something bigger than the Gates Foundation every year, potentially for the next few years.

And it's going to go to some stuff that will seem to the outside world fairly weird.

The joke going around the sort of AI circles is this is going to be a great year for shrimp welfare.

Because shrimp welfare, for arcane and reasons that are probably not worth going into here, has become like a sort of half-joking pet cause of the effect of altruists.

But it's a great year to be a shrimp.

It's probably also a great year to be working on global health and pandemic prevention, AI safety, these other sort of cause areas that are very closely affiliated with effective altruism.

Yeah.

I want to bring up one other thing about these IPOs and ask for your opinion about it, which is that the thing that makes me nervous about these IPOs is not that they could go sideways or people could lose money or these companies are very speculative.

All of that is true.

What worries me is the safety angle here because I...

am of the belief that these AI systems are getting more powerful, that those increased capabilities also bring increased risks.

And I just know that many of these AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropix specifically, were started by people who were worried about safety and specifically worried about the ability of a for-profit corporation to develop AI safely.

At OpenAI, you've had this sort of governance struggle that resulted in, among other things, Sam Altman being fired and rehired.

At Anthropic, they have sort of made themselves a public benefit corporation to try to kind of lessen the influence of sort of shareholder capital and fiduciary duty on their ability to make decisions related to safety.

But I think all of that just gets much harder in a world where these are publicly traded companies that, you know—

big investors, index fund holders that retirees are invested in, it was already going to be hard to sort of slow down or maybe refuse to release something that was dangerous because of the enormous sums of money that these companies have raised.

But it's going to be a lot harder when the public markets are also pressuring these companies to race and go as fast as they can.