Mike McCormick

Friends in DC: Go talk to Daniel's team. They're smart, great to talk to, and you can learn a lot from each other even if you disagree.

@calebwatney @HaydnBelfield @IFP @coeff_giving @mattsclancy Wow amazing, congrats Caleb!

Some bittersweet news to announce today: I recently left @IFP to join @coeff_giving as Managing Director of Public Policy, where I'm building a new US AI policy team, overseeing the Abundance and Growth Fund alongside @mattsclancy, and managing CG's government affairs work. Building IFP has been the defining professional project of my life, and this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. In just four and a half years, our team became, pound-for-pound, the most effective think tank in DC. I feel insanely proud of the work we’ve done and the incredible team we’ve assembled. I sometimes joke that when @alecstapp and I launched IFP, we felt like two kids in a trench coat pretending to be a think tank. And now we're a proper institution! But it feels possible to step back now because they've hit escape velocity. The talent density at IFP is bonkers. And I have complete confidence they'll keep racking up counterfactual policy wins with Alec at the helm and our superstar directors. I'm staying on the IFP board and staying in DC. In some sense the new role is a continuation of the old one. All of IFP's policy issues are reflected in CG's portfolio, but now I'm working at a new layer of the stack. So why leave? Because AI is hitting Washington like a tsunami, and DC is still radically underprepared. I hold a lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems very plausible that the next 2–10 years will bring the fastest technological upheaval we've ever had to navigate. The new team I’m leading is a bet on how to prepare: proactively scanning the horizon, identifying gaps in the policy ecosystem, headhunting founders, and launching new organizations, while strengthening the democratic institutions that will have to steer through the transition to powerful AI systems. I've written an essay laying out the larger vision here: calebwatney.substack.com/p/a-long-seque… There is no master plan or silver bullet here. I suspect getting AI "right" is going to feel more like a chaotic, iterative process of institutions trying to make better decisions over time as the facts change underneath them. As John von Neumann wrote in 1955 about mastering an earlier technological revolution: “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.” Each of the small, correct decisions ahead will look small only in the sweep of the full historical picture. Up close, every one of them will require heroic levels of effort and coordination. Coefficient Giving is scaling rapidly to meet the moment, part of what Nan Ransohoff has called the “third wave of American philanthropy”, potentially large enough to fund thousands of new projects and organizations. The binding constraint is unlikely to be money. It will be people: grantmakers and policy entrepreneurs and others with the judgment to make a long sequence of small, correct decisions, and the ambition to build the institutions we wish we had. I'm hiring a team of exactly those people, starting with generalist grant makers and a chief of staff. If you share this vision, please apply! And if you are building something that we’ll need in the years ahead, reach out. jobs.ashbyhq.com/coefficientgiv…

Yes

Congrats Geoffrey and co!

Don’t let AI lab folk trick you into thinking that (1) joining the nth dozen equivalently senior people at an AI lab is more important than (2) filling a unique C-suite slot at a nonprofit or government safety group!

@matthewjmandel Seriously

2026, man

do you have an ambitious idea for how to make AGI go well? do you need money? do you hate bureaucracy and friction? apply now for microgrants! docs.google.com/document/d/10z…

That's a wrap on Building AI Resilience. Five funders on the questions shaping the resilience field: where markets are ready to back resilience vs. where philanthropy has to lead, whether defense can move at frontier pace, and how a field absorbing new capital avoids piling correlated bets on the same threat models. The punchline we selfishly loved to hear: NYC is underrated for this work. Less groupthink than SF. Home to the industries frontier AI hits first (e.g. healthcare, insurance, utilities, compliance). Home to capital markets + legal talent to structure the deals, boards, and institutions the field needs. Rumor has it the panel was so hot it broke the AC. More to come. Thanks to those who joined and those who continue to build the NYC AI Governance & Safety community with us. Huge thank you to @SexyLikeMeiosis @rossmatican @James_D_Fox @yonashav Matt Hawes @buildexante @Convergent_FROs @HalcyonFutures @HalcyonVC @FoundationOAI @schmidtsciences @manaltdan

@asimov_co @IanRountree @grant__gregory @ameekapadia Incredibly sick @IanRountree

We’ve dreamed of creating an archeofuturist brand since the earliest days of Asimov Collective, and @IanRountree, @grant__gregory, and @ameekapadia proved to be the perfect partners to bring that vision to life. Inspired by Trajan’s Column, we imagined a future where the most important companies of our era are commemorated for the civilization they helped build. Cantos exists to recognize the founders and companies laying the foundations of a more advanced, abundant, and inspiring future. Resonat in aeternum.

the inimitable @Kristian_Ronn in @billyperrigo’s piece in @TIME, “Can the Cold War Teach Us How to Slow Down AI?” “I would hate it if we had to choose between the extremes of a global pandemic [designed by AI] killing us, or a totalitarian state monitoring our every move…Both of these extremes seem really, really bad… What we're saying is that you can actually, through cryptography, maintain privacy and have security at the same time.” “We want [verification technology] to exist, we want it to be red-teamed with nation-state actors and the labs, and ready to go…We don't want to be too late. Being too late here has real world consequences.” cc @Will4Planet @DarioAmodei @reidhoffman @tristanharris @aza @JasonGMatheny @RepLoriTrahan @JayObernolte @soundboy @EileenDonahoe @ericschmidt @ghadfield @hendrycks @moskov @VitalikButerin @Gregory_C_Allen @crmiller1 @Miles_Brundage @albrgr @woj_zaremba @jackclarkSF Bri Treece Jeff Alstott Conrad Stosz

The world needs more projects with this level of ambition.

Congrats @incredutility, @nanransohoff, @patrickc and @collision on launching Intercept with the mission of solving respiratory disease. Super exciting project and a formidable team!

you should keep your software company private forever so you can pay charlie petty to cure respiratory viruses

Transluce is hiring for their scalable interpretability team! If you like the idea of bitter lesson pilled interpretability, and techniques like activation oracles, NLAs and PCD, apply!

@tyler_m_john you monster

I would like to see humans in charge of the universe

AGI company employees should explicitly ask “how much wealth and prestige would I need to be comfortable leaving to do something unconventional?” Because the actual answer is usually either “a level I already have” or “always more than I have”, which should prompt reflection.

"You'd best start believing in Science Fiction stories; you're in one."

This is a CAISI staff appreciation tweet. A remarkable set of ML experts at CAISI, including my PhD classmates, have stuck it out through all the uncertainty of the last few years, foregoing extremely lucrative industry offers to ensure the USG can now react well to frontier AI. Thank you for your service.

Reminder that the last 12 months are plausibly the least crazy months of AI for the rest of your life! It's only getting crazier from here ...

Loss of control is SF Concentration of power is NYC