The Nonlinear Library EA - 2023: news on AI safety, animal welfare, global health, and more by Lizka
Jan 6, 2024
24:34
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2023: news on AI safety, animal welfare, global health, and more, published by Lizka on January 6, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I'm listing some of the important and/or EA-related events that happened in 2023. Consider adding more in the comments!
A companion post collects research and other "content" highlights from 2023. (That post features content; the one you're reading summarizes news.)
Also, the monthly
EA Newsletter
discussed a lot of the events collected here, and was the starting point for the list of events in this post. If you're subscribed,
we would really love feedback.
Skip to:
News related to different causes
AI safety: AI went mainstream, states developed safety-oriented regulation, there was a lot of discourse, and more
Global health & development: new vaccines, modified mosquitoes, threatened programs, and ongoing trends
Animal welfare: political reforms and alternative proteins
Updates in causes besides AI safety, global health, and animal welfare
Concluding notes
Other notes:
There might be errors in what I wrote (I'll appreciate corrections!).
Omissions! I avoided pretty political events (I think they're probably covered sufficiently elsewhere) and didn't focus on scientific breakthroughs. Even besides that, though, I haven't tried to be exhaustive, and I'd love to collect more important events/things from 2023. Please suggest things to add.
I'd love to see reflections on 2023 events.
What surprised you? What seemed important but now feels like it might have been overblown? What are the impacts of some of these events?
And I'd love to see forecasts about what we should expect for 2024 and beyond.
I put stars next to some content and news that seemed particularly important, although I didn't use this consistently.
More context on how and why I made this: I wanted to collect "important stuff from 2023" to reflect on the year, and realized that one of the resources I have is one I run - the monthly
EA Newsletter. So I started compiling what was meant to be a quick doc-turned-post (by pulling out events from the Newsletter's archives, occasionally updating them or looking into them a bit more). Things kind of ballooned as I worked on this post. (Now there are two posts that aren't short; see the companion, which is less focused on news and more focused on "content.")
AI safety: AI went mainstream, states developed safety-oriented regulation, there was a lot of discourse, and more
See also featured content on AI safety.
0. GPT-4 and other models, changes at AI companies, and other news in AI (not necessarily safety)
Before we get to AI safety or AI policy developments, here are some relevant changes for AI development in 2023:
New models: OpenAI
launched
GPT-4 in mid-March (
alongside announcements from Google, Anthropic, and more). Also around this time (February/March), Google released Bard, Meta released Llama, and Microsoft released Bing/Sydney (which was
impressive and weird/scary).
Model use, financial impacts, and training trends: more people started
using AI models. Developers got API access to
various models. Advanced AI chips continued getting better and compute use
increased and
got more efficient.
Improvements in models: We started seeing pretty powerful multimodal models (models that can process audio, video, images - not just text), including GPT-4 and
Gemini. Context windows grew longer.
Forecasters on Metaculus seem to increasingly expect human-AI parity on selected tasks by 2040.
Changes in leading AI companies:
Google combined Brain and DeepMind into one team,
Amazon invested in Anthropic,
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI,
Meta partnered with Hugging Face, a number of new companies launched, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was
fired and then reinstated (
more on that).
Other news: Generative AI companies are increasingly getting su...
I'm listing some of the important and/or EA-related events that happened in 2023. Consider adding more in the comments!
A companion post collects research and other "content" highlights from 2023. (That post features content; the one you're reading summarizes news.)
Also, the monthly
EA Newsletter
discussed a lot of the events collected here, and was the starting point for the list of events in this post. If you're subscribed,
we would really love feedback.
Skip to:
News related to different causes
AI safety: AI went mainstream, states developed safety-oriented regulation, there was a lot of discourse, and more
Global health & development: new vaccines, modified mosquitoes, threatened programs, and ongoing trends
Animal welfare: political reforms and alternative proteins
Updates in causes besides AI safety, global health, and animal welfare
Concluding notes
Other notes:
There might be errors in what I wrote (I'll appreciate corrections!).
Omissions! I avoided pretty political events (I think they're probably covered sufficiently elsewhere) and didn't focus on scientific breakthroughs. Even besides that, though, I haven't tried to be exhaustive, and I'd love to collect more important events/things from 2023. Please suggest things to add.
I'd love to see reflections on 2023 events.
What surprised you? What seemed important but now feels like it might have been overblown? What are the impacts of some of these events?
And I'd love to see forecasts about what we should expect for 2024 and beyond.
I put stars next to some content and news that seemed particularly important, although I didn't use this consistently.
More context on how and why I made this: I wanted to collect "important stuff from 2023" to reflect on the year, and realized that one of the resources I have is one I run - the monthly
EA Newsletter. So I started compiling what was meant to be a quick doc-turned-post (by pulling out events from the Newsletter's archives, occasionally updating them or looking into them a bit more). Things kind of ballooned as I worked on this post. (Now there are two posts that aren't short; see the companion, which is less focused on news and more focused on "content.")
AI safety: AI went mainstream, states developed safety-oriented regulation, there was a lot of discourse, and more
See also featured content on AI safety.
0. GPT-4 and other models, changes at AI companies, and other news in AI (not necessarily safety)
Before we get to AI safety or AI policy developments, here are some relevant changes for AI development in 2023:
New models: OpenAI
launched
GPT-4 in mid-March (
alongside announcements from Google, Anthropic, and more). Also around this time (February/March), Google released Bard, Meta released Llama, and Microsoft released Bing/Sydney (which was
impressive and weird/scary).
Model use, financial impacts, and training trends: more people started
using AI models. Developers got API access to
various models. Advanced AI chips continued getting better and compute use
increased and
got more efficient.
Improvements in models: We started seeing pretty powerful multimodal models (models that can process audio, video, images - not just text), including GPT-4 and
Gemini. Context windows grew longer.
Forecasters on Metaculus seem to increasingly expect human-AI parity on selected tasks by 2040.
Changes in leading AI companies:
Google combined Brain and DeepMind into one team,
Amazon invested in Anthropic,
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI,
Meta partnered with Hugging Face, a number of new companies launched, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was
fired and then reinstated (
more on that).
Other news: Generative AI companies are increasingly getting su...