Models by mdickens

/*
This model compares the expected impact on future AIs' values from two interventions:

1. Conventional animal activism — persuading people to care more about farm animals / eat less meat
2. Creating a friendliness-to-animals LLM benchmark and advocating for AI companies to use it in post-training.

My numbers are intentionally overly optimistic toward conventional activism and overly pessimistic toward an LLM benchmark because I was pretty sure the latter was going to look better, and indeed it still looks better by >2 orders of magnitude.

I came up with the input parameters by doing approximately three seconds of research, I'm sure they could be much better.

/*
Is it a good idea for US actors to accelerate an AI arms race with China?
*/

// Probability that an aligned AI has good values regardless of what its creator wants, i.e., an aligned Chinese-built AI will refuse to let China take over the world.
p_aligned_ai_enforces_good_values = 0.1

// Probability that China would take over the world if it could.
p_china_would_take_over_the_world = 0.6

/*
 * EV of AI safety technical research vs. policy advocacy, in 
 * terms of change in probability of extinction.
*/

@doc(
  "Open Phil granted $69M on AI safety in 2023; a LW post[1] says $43M of that was on technical AI safety; but most of that was not directly funding alignment research (generously, only $28M was alignment research, the rest being forecasting/field-building/etc.). There are some other philanthropic funders, plus for-profit companies do some internal safety research. Internal research is the bulk of the money but I expect most of it is bad ex ante (e.g. fake safetywashing research). It would be feasible to estimate spending on AI 'safety' research, but harder to estimate how much of that spending is real, so I kinda just made up a number range.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/adzfKEW98TswZEA6T/brief-analysis-of-op-technical-ai-safety-funding"
)

/*
A cost-effectiveness analysis for starting a communist revolution in the United States.

Critics of EA like to say that it's impossible to create a CEA for a communist revolution. I am making this to prove that it's possible.

This wasn't even hard, it took me like half an hour. I'm sure I could do a much better job if I invested more time.
*/

@doc("Conservative estimate. Surely communism is at least 20% better than capitalism but it's likely much better than that.

/*
 * Cost-effectiveness analysis for Uganda Community Farm's grain cleaning facility
 */

/*
 * Model Inputs
 */

// As of 2024-05-24
gbp_to_usd :: usd/gbp  = 1.27

/*
 * Cost-effectiveness analysis for Uganda Community Farm's program to 
 * buy sorghum seeds and supplies necessary to grow sorghum.
 * 
 * Some parts of this model are copy/pasted from
 * https://squigglehub.org/models/mdickens/Uganda-Community-Farm-facility 
 */

// As of 2024-05-24
ugx_to_usd = 1 / 3828