Eli Barrish
Bio
Litigator in Austin, TX. Stanford Law School '24. UT Austin '18.
Comments12
The aggregate portfolio of Open Phil and Good Ventures is quite bad for the world... I also genuinely think you are causing pretty huge harm for the world.
Can you elaborate on this? Your previous comments explain why you think OP's portfolio is suboptimal, but not why you think it is actively harmful. It sounds like you may have written about this elsewhere.
This comment overall isn't obviously immediately relevant
My experience of reading this thread is that it feels like I am missing essential context. Many of the comments seem to be responding to arguments made in previous, perhaps private, conversations. Your view that OP is harmful might not be immediately relevant here, but I think it would help me understand where you are coming from. My prior (which is in line with your prediction that the vast majority of readers would disagree with your comment) is that OP is very good.
It would not be hard to do, but I don't quite get the point. What's the case for giving pro bono legal counseling to ex-OAI employees? They have the resources to coordinate and hire their own lawyers. Plaintiff-side firms have probably already reached out to them because it's in the news. Is the idea that writing a public legal memo analyzing the contract in depth would generate EA-related goodwill among the ex-OAIs, who are likely to go on to work at other AI shops? I'm not sure if that really makes sense.
I forwarded your question to an EA-aligned Stanford Law School professor who has worked in the startup space. Here is what he said (tl;dr he thinks you should patent it):
[A] patent & startup is an excellent way to protect & scale the technology. If the tech is in the public domain, it might actually deter a larger company from developing/using it because they'll fear a competitor will use the tech and undercut their price.
The best path would likely be to patent it and then either license it to a large company or spin out a startup. If the PhD is a "scientist" type (and has no desire to be a businessperson / operator) then she might need to find co-founders to assist.
I'd be happy to pass along his contact info via DM if you want to discuss further (he is happy to chat with you). Congrats on the cool tech!
It wasn't one specific thing. When I was organizing for our law school EA group, I came across a lot of unexpected ways make an impact with a JD. I just wanted to put out an open invitation to chat with anyone feeling pessimistic about this path. Plus it's fun meeting other law people on here.