Dan Selsam's AI risk statement called essential reading amid safety funding debate
JacquesThibs · x · 2026-09-17
Blogger Jacques Thibodeau recommends Dan Selsam's statement on AI risk (shared by Daniel Kokotajlo) as the week's essential read, rating its importance 8/10, alongside commentary on the debate over concentration in AI safety funding.
- He recalls how, in 2018-2020, AGI risk advocates trying to collaborate with AI ethics scholars were dismissed as lunatics, likened to "worrying about overpopulation on Mars"
- He argues those advocates spent years quietly running experiments and building expertise, only to see their concerns sidelined again
- The 18-minute essay covers researcher choices and the ongoing funding-concentration dispute within the safety community
Related event: OpenAI researcher Dan Selsam's AI risk statement draws attention(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Databases to distributed systems: every systems skill is merging into AI inference and hardware — Abhishekcur · 2026-11-02
- Limitless analogy: smarter people may gain far more from superintelligence — McDonaghMatthew · 2026-11-02
- Hunting for the most concrete "curing cancer with AI" roadmap of 2025 — iskander · 2026-11-02
- Avoiding AI brain rot: Miles Cranmer's lecture on learning with AI — _ScottCondron · 2026-11-02
- Yacine mocks "autonomous research" hype as Naam argues RSI loop needs 5-10x boost to run away — yacineMTB · 2026-11-02
- Vitalik's "post-AI cryptography": pseudonyms are dead, per-action anonymity is in — devanshmehta · 2026-11-02