Winter 2024/5

The clocks have moved forwards, courgette seeds have been planted, my chilblains are slowly fading. And now feels like a good time for another update.

• Locations: Currently at home in London, but before that mostly in Oxford, and enjoyed taking a trip to Bristol last week.¹ February was quite busy: snuck away from Oxford to sunny SF for 12 days (had an EA conference and team retreat), and was also briefly in Paris for an AI security event. (I love the wind farms along the French portion of the Eurostar route!)
• Projects: I’ve taken on more of the running of OAISI, and am also spending more time on investments at Macroscopic, which meant that organising Oxheart events or the economics hackathon didn’t really seem feasible, unfortunately. I did put together a largeish retreat way back at the start of January and learned a lot from the experience, though. Various capital improvements in cyberspace: I added some quotes, thoughts, and pictures.
• Interests: Had a lot of fun figuring out the basics of bell-ringing; reminded me of the satisfaction I got from finding the clutch’s biting point when I was first starting to drive. Lots of climbing (and bought my own pair of shoes - it’s nice not paying the psychological cost of renting a pair each time),² some baking & cooking & running. Got my dad hooked on Claude-led vibe coding.

Things on my mind

• How to run hiring rounds and select for the right things; what good management involves
• What does sensible investment policy/strategy look like if you think there’s a serious chance that transformative AI gets developed in the next five to ten years?
  • Lots of subquestions here, e.g. about how AI takeoff might change the value of capital, where you expect the market for frontier models to on a scale from monopolistic winner-takes-all to perfect competition (in the worlds where humanity survives OK), whether the “application layer” is where value will be captured, the importance of liquidity, etc.
  • There are many more takes on this out there: see e.g. this discussion, or Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund
• The extent to which I’m willing to give up on pursuing side-quests around Oxford to instead focus on things that feel more morally pressing
  • Potentially fun & rewarding side quests include e.g. Oxheart, journalism & magazines, student politics / the Union
  • Also, maybe getting involved with those things would teach me a lot and I’m missing out on making the most of the university training ground!
  • Had some conversations with people ~10 years older than me who reckon they’d be living very different lives if they weren’t at all bothered about impact, and I’m not sure that I’d be able to cheerfully make that kind of sacrifice, even though it feels (in a respect) admirable.
  • If only Aristotle were right that ethical excellence was necessarily tied to prudential flourishing…

Media consumption

• Was studying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics last term and actually enjoyed reading it a lot, to my pleasant surprise. Having an excellent tutor makes a huge difference.
• Quite a lot of films & TV shows over Christmas (and more recently), though not very many that I’d especially recommend. I did like The Post and She Said though, and the third episode of Adolescence was extremely good. Maybe I should use Letterboxd or something.
• Voraciously reading fiction again, for the first time in a long time. Mostly light & easy sci-fi, especially Martha Wells’s “Murderbot Diaries” series.
• Have signed up for lots of Substacks, and am reading those instead of scrolling aimlessly on news sites. I’m very averse to having a cluttered inbox so I hadn’t subscribed to any before, but using plus aliasing and a filter rule means that they all go into a special “newsletters” folder, which means I can have the best of both worlds :)
• The climbing gym in Oxford plays quite a lot of techno music and I’m getting into it, though finding good Spotify playlists with upbeat, no-vocals tunes always ends up harder than I expect. Recommendations welcome!