EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This article was written with the aid of AI for research, structure, and phrasing. It may contain >10% AI-generated text. What Has Nature Done For Me Lately? In this sequence I try to determine the most valuable aspects of nature, after observing that lots of people find it valuable. One of the major candidates is “ecosystem services,” a term describing benefits we get from nature.[1] I find th...

I used AI while writing this, though I have spent 5 - 15 hours on it and I take responsibility for every word and all numbers. Every time there is a report of sexual harassment within EA there is a lot of introspection. I want to push back on this, not to dismiss the experiences described, which sound genuinely painful, but because I am unsure the evidence supports the belief that EA is uniquely b...

This is a link post. I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll say it again: I’m worried about Anthropic's and OpenAI's (possible) IPOs. Tl;dr: there's a good chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI becomes a publicly traded company in the near future. Somehow this makes a lot of capital that was previously solid melt into a liquid. That liquid capital can then be given to whatever the people who own it...

TL;DR Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. Key highlights from this post: We believe that strategic cross-cause prioritization is an important step in doin...

A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction. More money, more people willing to sta...

This report was written by Christian de Weerd for Rethink Priorities. It was primarily meant to inform our own thinking about the merits of biological naturalism about consciousness. However, as Christian did such an excellent job on the report, we thought it might be worth sharing more broadly. We should mention that, at least as far as we know, Christian won't be monitoring the comments. Executi...

We are excited to announce a new Request for Proposals (RFP) for effective giving organizations, defined as initiatives that raise funds for highly effective charities. Through this RFP, we aim to identify and support additional efforts in the effective giving space and streamline the application process for potential grantees. Motivation Our Effective Giving & Careers Fund has historically su...

Tldr; EAs seem more focused on non-extinction risks from AI than they used to be I haven’t seen much discussion of why, making reference to the very longrun   Changes in the world this might be responding to are: alignment seeming more promising than it used to, the speed of AI progress, and concerns around US governance. There are also plausible sociological reasons for the shift, so I feel...

This is a link post. [Subtitle.] Automating R&D is not sufficient for superintelligence This is a crosspost for The Goodhart Singularity by Tom Reed, which was originally published on Thomas's Substack on 7 May 2026. Buyer beware: bombastic claims advanced, often flippantly. AI systems are starting to build themselves. Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor t...

This is a link post. cart;horse: Most startups fail, this one did too. Tried too much with too little, with a little too much ego. Coordinal Research's goal was to build an automated safety research platform. A researcher writes “Replicate X result from paper Y with tweak Z” and the system provisions a sandboxed compute environment, gathers context, writes code, runs experiments, and returns a res...

Hello Effective Altruists! I write to let you know that Legal Impact for Chickens is suing California's largest poultry producer, Foster Farms, for animal cruelty. Foster Farms raises and slaughters approximately 290 million chickens per year. LIC's complaint accuses Foster Farms of crushing chickens with forklifts, forcing birds to live among the maggot-covered corpses of their dead flock mates,...

The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact's Slack workspace about GiveWell's decision to stop funding Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water program. The conversation surfaced themes that we felt were worth sharing more broadly. Everyone involved consented to their thoughts being shared in t...

In Development is "a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress happens — or doesn’t happen — in the developing world". This week (May 11-17), the EA Forum is collaborating with the magazine to bring you their first batch of articles[1], along with their authors[2], ready to answer your questions. Lauren Gilbert, the magazine's editor-in-chief, will also be present in this thread to answer q...

TLDR NGOs pay less than for-profits. Employees accept this because they have impact. This makes employees implicit donors to the NGOs NGOs should account for this in cost-effectiveness calculations This is a coordination problem and can only be solved as a movement Salary sacrifice is more tax-efficient than donating the money This would make finding talent for pressing problems much easier It is...

This is a link post. Our mission is to protect humanity against biological catastrophes, including those that could lead to human extinction or cause similarly bad outcomes. This series of posts outlines how I think about these most extreme types of risks. My goal here is to share my worldview in a straightforward and compressed form rather than trying to persuade a skeptical audience, although I...

Crosspost. I first watched the YouTube videos of Jack Hancock in high school, and they might be where I first heard the case for the moral significance of wild animal suffering. I met Jack at EAG London last year. He recently released a film called The Dying Trade: it is one of the best films I’ve watched, and I recommend you watch it. Jack is a vegan activist. His father is a slaughterhouse worke...

Summary AI safety is constrained on talent in many ways, but the reasons behind the constraints vary between types of talent. This post is based on all posts and documents I could find from the past ~ 3 years related to hiring needs and talent pipelines, which I have listed in this document. Technical research talent - we have strong talent pipelines delivering young researchers to the field, but...

I’m an EA who has been trying to find ways to make animal suffering more salient. I’ve been working on a feature-length documentary called ‘The Dying Trade’ for the last 5 years and I’ve just released it on YouTube. I’m sharing it here for two reasons: firstly, because I hope it can become a useful resource that advocates share with others as an introduction to animal ethics; and secondly, because...

This is a link post. Cross-posted from The Counterfactual by the Forum Team. Subtitle: A concrete strategy for deploying the largest wave of philanthropic capital in history The OpenAI Foundation holds $180 billion in equity. Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. When the time comes to spend all this money, what should we actually do with it? Here's my best guess. The...

Last month, Anthropic announced Mythos Preview, the most powerful cyberweapon in history, capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. Meanwhile, many frontier AI company employees increasingly expect full automation of AI R&D in the next year or two, followed by the rapid automation of thousands of other important tasks and jobs....

This is a link post. Disclaimer: I’m not vegan. I’m not even vegetarian. I eat meat all the time. I’ve been a firm critic of efforts to objectively quantify the difference in suffering across very different species. That said, I cannot help but agree that eating meat is probably the morally worst thing I do, and I also have to agree that eating different kinds of meat are different levels of bad....

This is a link post. I had a conversation with someone who claimed offhandedly that AI will dramatically raise agricultural productivity (via agritech advancements) in low-income countries and trigger growth as a result. My instinct was to respond that we've already had substantial advancements in agricultural technology, and yet it hasn't resulted in the magnitude of yield growth, let alone econo...

Overview When asked about how they would give away money, or about how to have a moral career, the leading LLMs typically give answers in an EA spirit, and informed by thinking from people and organizations in the EA community. In many cases the term “effective altruism”, and/or EA jargon, are used explicitly. The flavor of EA they tend to endorse is relatively middle of the road: supporting effec...

This is a crosspost of the full text of Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly's journey to $1 billion delivered from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. GiveDirectly will be taking part in the discussion thread, but the author, Paul Niehaus, may not see your comments here. If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack...

This is a crosspost of the full text of Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here. June Jambiha was a quintessential hustler. Like many in Kenya's capital of Nairobi, she sold clothing as an informal entr...