Rob Wiblin

But I think what we can contribute now would be things that just inherently take a long lead time to set up.

So that might include physical infrastructure, like the bioinfrastructure that my colleague Andrew is working on building out.

It might also include just social consensus.

I think it takes some amount of time for an idea to be socialized in society, to have it as an accessible...

concept that maybe we should try and create some sort of treaty between the US and China to allow AI to progress somewhat slower than it might naturally and use a bunch of AI compute to solve all these problems.

I think that kind of thing takes years to become something

that's in people's toolkit in the water such that they actually think to have the AIs like go down that path and like figure out the details of that.

Yeah.

So in terms of other organizations, I think it would be especially great for government entities to be thinking about adopting AI.

I know that there's just a number of random little types of red tape that make it harder for governments to adopt AIs than for anyone in industry to adopt AIs.

And I think we might end up in a situation where the regulatees, the industry people have fast cars and the regulators have horses and buggies because of this differential adoption gap.

And I think just more broadly,

If your company is not already going maximally hard on adopting AI for your personal use case, and you work on defenses, AI safety, moral philosophy, all these good things, it's probably worth having a team that's just kind of on the lookout for how could you sort of adopt AI as soon as it becomes actually useful for you.

Yeah.

So I think that...

I had been at OpenPhil for more than six years before I made my first grant.

I was involved in some grant-making conversations earlier, but the first grant I actually led on was somewhere in mid or late 2023, and I had joined OpenPhil in 2016.

So it was like kind of interesting, like my work at OpenPhil, in some sense, if you kind of if you just took the outside view and said, you know, this is a philanthropy that's giving away money.

My work there was like very strange because it was kind of thinking about these heady topics and then like writing these like long reports that I published on Less Wrong about them.

And I always felt a little like, oh, maybe I should dip into grant making because that is like our core product in some sense.