Program officer @coeff_giving building the workforce and infrastructure to navigate transformative AI. Econ PhD from @PSEinfo
Asuncion, Paraguay
Joined July 2014
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David Bernard retweeted
🚨 Reminder: Applications to our Middle Powers RFP close on October 23rd, 11:59pm PST! 🚨
David Bernard retweeted
OpenAI fired me last week, along with two of my safety colleagues. I was given one reason: that I accessed an executive's email. I want to say this plainly, because too many of OpenAI’s history is smoke and mirrors when people disappear:
David Bernard retweeted
I'm a longtime Effective Altruist and the co-founder of the organization most frequently used as a stand-in for "EAs have lost their minds" (a.k.a. Shrimp Welfare Project). I've also read The Economist for over 20 years, so I was disappointed by how they portrayed a community I feel proud to be part of.
I never post but I could hardly believe the verbal gymnastics one needs to do to make things like “taking moral commitments seriously” and "considering evidence and odds explicitly, correcting for biases" sound like the problem. I felt I had to speak my mind.
Some of the implicit criticisms of EA are that we're young, inexperienced, from elite universities, polyamorous, wildly eccentric, etc. FWIW, I'm in my mid-40s, Mexican, straight, have a beautiful wife and 2 kids, and I grew up in a mid-sized conservative city with loving parents who got divorced when I was six. Pretty standard.
After my parents divorced, my mom frequently had to make difficult economic choices, like whether to buy flowers for our kitchen table and eat only quesadillas, or eat something a tiny bit fancier. I always told her I loved quesadillas because I knew flowers made her happy.
After graduating from a public university, I worked in finance for ~15 years and saved as much as I could so I could spare my wife and future kids the economic hardships I experienced. In that time I met thousands of people in finance, corporate law, accounting, real estate, insurance, etc. Most were decent, well-educated, ambitious and smart, all doing their best to excel in their professions. Most wanted to make money and improve their own and their loved ones’ quality of life. Nothing to see here.
Since I found Effective Altruism ~7 years ago, most of the people I come across are of a different rarer kind. They come from all over the world, in all shapes and sizes, but they have the one thing in common: they want to improve the world using evidence and reason wherever that leads them. Yeah, they/we make a ton of mistakes like everyone but, IMHO tend to own them more frequently than the average person.
I've met people who could easily be making >100% more money in a normal job, but instead they dedicate themselves to improving the lives of those who need it the most. People in the poorest countries whose children die from preventable diseases, from lack of basic medical equipment or vaccination, from lead in paint. Animals in factory farms subjected to conditions that most people find abhorrent, doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian or a huge meat lover.
Yes, recently many of the people in my community are moving to work on making sure that AI and other powerful new technologies don't result in terrible things for humanity. I'm one of those people and contrary to what the article would suggest, it has nothing to do with the fact that SBF committed one of the biggest frauds in history or that someone wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. I'm doing it because I want to do the little that's in my power to make the world that my kids and grandkids (and yes, potentially their great-great-grandchildren) will inherit a better one.
EA gave me a way to do that and I will be forever thankful. So no, I'm not EA-adjacent.
economist.com/international/…
David Bernard retweeted
Palisade interviewed 22 current and former employees from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic about their personal views and fears around AI development.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
David Bernard retweeted
The AGI Strategy course was due for an upgrade. I now feel comfortable recommending this course as a default introduction to the problem of AI safety, which is something I couldn't say before.
Give it a read, and send it to your cracked-est friends!
David Bernard retweeted
If your feed is anything like mine, you might have been hearing more about effective altruism this week. I think the key underlying reason for the surge is that concern about the risks from advanced AI have been getting more airtime recently, and EA was early to those concerns.
What’s driving the surge in attention on AI risks?
-OpenAI's Hugging Face attack (openai.com/index/hugging-fac…)
-METR/Redwood’s investigation of the hack came out, and (correctly IMO) freaked a lot of people out. (e.g. xitter.gq/binarybits/status/2092…, xitter.gq/SenJohnKennedy/status/…, xitter.gq/BarackObama/status/210…, xitter.gq/HawleyMO/status/209813…)
-Jacob Coxon’s resignation went mega viral as the first time a lot of people heard the (crazy, true) fact that lots of people building the most advanced AI systems think there’s a >10% chance they will kill everyone.
-That’s moving public opinion in a big way (xitter.gq/davidshor/status/21003…, semafor.com/article/09/16/20…)
What does any of this have to do with effective altruism?
Well, effective altruism is a community that developed mostly online starting in the early 2010s around using evidence and reason to do the most good (especially with your donations and career choice). Three very different focuses have all been popular in the EA community since the beginning: effective giving in global health and development (e.g., donating to the kinds of organizations @givewell recommends, which do things like distribute bednets to prevent the spread of malaria), trying to reduce suffering for farm animals (which are orders of magnitude more numerous, treated vastly worse, and receive way less philanthropic attention than animals in shelters), and reducing risks to the future of humanity, especially from advanced AI. I personally came into this work from the global health angle - I had started working at GiveWell before the term “effective altruism” was coined - but Coefficient Giving, the funder I cofounded and now lead, over time came to fund work across all three of these streams of work (in addition to many other areas that aren’t typically associated with EA, such as the YIMBY movement to build more housing, work on science policy to accelerate discovery and economic growth, and research on new treatments for neglected diseases).
OK, so the EA community was early to work on AI safety, and CG has been funding a lot of the key players working on AI safety for a long time. As AI risk concerns have popped over the past couple of months, that’s led to more scrutiny on the EA community for IMO a mix of good and bad reasons.
I think the good reason is genuine curiosity (and maybe some healthy skepticism!) about these connections - where did the ideas of the people who are now leading giant AI companies come from? Why is everything in this world so interconnected? (My answer: it used to be a really small world - very few people were thinking about this stuff or taking it seriously until just a few years ago, so of course the ones who were found each other and started collaborating. It’s kind of wild IMO looking back how prescient some of the early writing from this world was (e.g. lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf…). At the time, I was skeptical - I mostly just worked on global health and I was like “I dunno about this SV crowd freaking out about AI, how much can we really predict this stuff” but holy shit they were way more right than me, and I’ve moved in their direction a lot.)
But I think the bad reasons are unfortunately mostly self-interested. A bunch of powerful actors stand to benefit from unchecked AI progress, and they’re doing everything in their power to demonize or dismiss anyone with concerns. This leads to disproportionate discussion of EA because EA is interested in neglected and underappreciated ways of doing good. That makes it open to weird ideas. And people, very disproportionately with a financial stake in the AI fight, are trying to make it about EA instead, because EA being weird is much safer territory for them than the rather uncomfortable fact that many of the people making the most advanced AIs think that they might kill everyone.
(FWIW, my personal estimation of the risks is a lot lower than many of the folks who worry about this stuff. In debates like this one (asteriskmag.com/issues/03/th…), I often feel more sympathetic to the perspective of folks like my colleague @mattsclancy than the people on the other side, and I have a lot of time for @binarybits critiques (understandingai.org/p/the-ca…). I think a big part of the difference with more worried folks is that I expect society to react more vs sleepwalk into a crisis. But it is not lost on me that folks like @ajeya_cotra and @RyanGreenblatt who are more worried have had outstanding and falsifiable recent forecasting track records (theaidigest.org/2025-ai-fore…), making way better predictions than I would have. So I think their perspectives need to be taken seriously. And of course a single digit percent chance of everyone dying is way too high!)
Where should this leave you?
I think the main thing is not to get distracted. You absolutely do not have to be an EA, care about EA, or like EA, at all, to care about risks from AI and to be engaged on this issue. Everyone from Josh Hawley to the Pope to Obama are weighing in now, and that is great. This conversation was always too big and too important for any one community to drive. It’s unfortunate that we need to play catch up as society because until this year it was too weird for most people to want to engage with, and I think that should generate some grace for people who were earlier to these topics than most of us (certainly than I was). But it’s great the conversation is broadening now and it’s good to focus on the merits of where we are now and the appropriate policy response rather than getting caught up in the (in some sense unsurprising) fact that the people who were willing to think weird thoughts about the future of AI ten years ago were also interested in other weird ideas. If you’re not into weird ideas, that’s fine, you can just do you, you shouldn’t let this history stop you from engaging.
Just to update this chart:
1) AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined
2) 80% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI will cause widespread job loss in the five to ten years
3) 64% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity's survival
4) Large bipartisan majorities back immediate government action on AI even when primed about risk from China
David Bernard retweeted
Hey! AI safety has been in the news a lot. If you live in the Bay Area and want to learn more, we're hosting a mixer at @farairesearch's office in Berkeley! Meet professionals currently working in AI safety, listen to a few lightning talks, get free food, and chat with others :)
David Bernard retweeted
Great podcast from @MaxNadeau_ on @80000Hours making the case for Project Tailwind, our call for AI safety founders.
Max has funded many technical AI safety organizations over the last three years and so has a helpful birds-eye perspective on what you can accomplish. If you’re motivated to work on some of the problems he describes, please reach out to us.
80000hours.org/podcast/episo…
David Bernard retweeted
I'm usually a pretty private person, but given my face has been in the news(!) I wanted to share a bit about myself.
Before moving to SF I was a British diplomat. I worked on missile defense and CBRN defense at @UKDELNATO during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I moved to SF to work more directly on making sure humanity gets to maximally benefit from the paradigm-shifting technology that is AI.
I worked at Open Philanthropy (who were early to AI Safety) and FutureHouse (who are trying to build “The AI Scientist”). I have always wanted the world to benefit from the full potential of this technology.
I want to make sure that we navigate the next few years and decades as safely as possible. I want us to maximize economic prosperity and for democratic values to flourish. And that is why I feel such pride about the work we’re doing at METR.
There are strong business incentives for the developers of frontier AI to not be maximally transparent, and whilst I have no ideological commitment to who plays this role, there need to be experts outside of companies providing the public some transparency into what they are building.
METR’s culture isn’t intellectually homogenous. Disagreements are encouraged. I work next to critics and skeptics of regulation as well as advocates. To spend a day in the METR office is to understand that, above all else, we care about Doing Science Well. How does one understand model capabilities? How can we make sure these models are controllable and monitorable?
So yeah, that’s a bit about me! Here’s a way better photo than the one they splashed on the front page of the Post. Scandalously, it was taken in London.
David Bernard retweeted
Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists:
Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics.
This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families.
And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs.
Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong.
But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.
David Bernard retweeted
Couldn’t agree more. Here’s the request for founders we launched this week: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
Please apply!
David Bernard retweeted
There are about 5-10 different in-depth scenarios people have written over the years.
AI-2027 is the easiest one to point to: ai-2027.com/
There is a good scenario in ifanyonebuilds.it
Here is Paul Christiano: lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdj…
Here is Gwern Branwen: lesswrong.com/posts/a5e9arCn…
David Bernard retweeted
Excited to announce the Automated AI Risk Outlook (AIRO), a dashboard of risk forecasts from frontier AI models, updated weekly as new information arrives and AI capabilities change.
A short thread on what we're doing and why - opinions are my own: 1/
RT @EmilyOehlsen: We’re urgently scaling our work on AI and biosecurity.
I began leading @coeff_giving’s grantmaking on AI and biosecurity…
David Bernard retweeted
CG's AI safety giving has changed and grown a lot in the last ~6mo or so, some detailed updates here:
coefficientgiving.org/resear…
David Bernard retweeted
The idea that powerful AI might kill everyone finally feels like it’s starting to go mainstream xitter.gq/hilbertspaess/status/2…
To everyone starting to take AI risk seriously: AI safety is currently woefully understaffed. There are huge holes in the field that basically have no owner. Today, @coeff_giving is launching Project Tailwind to solve this 🧵
David Bernard retweeted
Today, world-class founders are solving problems that markets can't alone. @METR_Evals is a clear example, but as @nanransohoff's The third wave of American philanthropy showed, we need others. There are now new onramps to start an organization shaping humanity's future.
Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them.
There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas:
coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re providing funding at three levels:
1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team
2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale
3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start
If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true!
Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.
David Bernard retweeted
Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them.
There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas:
coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re providing funding at three levels:
1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team
2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale
3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start
If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true!
Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.