Power, Windows, and Dependencies

Exercise: Map it out

Contested Questions in AI Governance

How should we handle open weights as models get more capable?

When, if ever, should frontier development be slowed - and by whom?

Finding Your Leverage Point

More Career Resources

Next Steps: Fellowships

Next steps: Programs

State of Play at the Frontier

Independent Evaluations

The Hugging Face Incident and the System Card

Exercise: The Briefing

Grappling with the Intelligence Explosion

Exercise: Governance Under Acceleration

Visions of Victory

Face off: Plan S vs Plan A

Argue it out (with yourself)

You've spent five units reading the field, mapping it, evaluating its proposals, and taking at least an initial position on one of its most contested questions. Now our final question is more personal: given everything you know - what do you do? 

For this Unit the focus will be less on "what should the world do" but rather on "what should you do, given who you are and what you know now."

So let's write it out! Write some amount of pages (bullets are fine) covering:

**What do you now believe? (~20 min)**
- Your worldview - revisit the positions you covered during the course, but try to zoom out. What's your overall picture of where AI (governance) is heading? Be honest about your confidence levels and unknowns (also known as learning opportunities).
- Try to be specific about your remaining uncertainties. For this find and name the 2-3 uncertainties that, if resolved, would change what you think should be done significantly.  

Some prompts if you get stuck:
- How urgent is all of this? Are we in a "years to get it right" or "months to get it right" situation? How many shots on goal do we get?
- What's the failure mode you're most worried about?
- Which of the Strategic Visions from Unit 3 do you now find most plausible - and has that changed since you first read them?
- What's the most important thing you learned in this course that you didn't know before?
- What do you now believe that you didn't believe a few weeks ago? What do you believe less strongly?

**What needs to be done? (~15 min)**
Try to identify 3-5 specific things that you think need to/should happen/should be looked into. Ideally these are concrete and actionable.

For each, ask:
- Is anyone doing this well right now? If yes, do they need help? If no, why not - is it a gap or is it intractable? Where is it on the spectrum?
- What's the main bottleneck? Is it talent, funding, lack of solution, political will, lack of a forcing event, technical knowledge, institutional capacity, or something else?
- How does this connect to your positions on these things?


**What should you do? (~25 min)**
Be honest with yourself. List your assets/gaps. What do you bring? 

Consider:
- Domain expertise (law, policy, finance, biology, security, engineering, etc.)
- Technical skills (coding, data analysis, research methods, model evaluation)
- Communication and writing ability. Can you explain technical things to non-specialists? Can you write clearly under time pressure? Do you enjoy it?
- Existing platform or audience. Do people already listen to you? A newsletter, a professional community, a social media following, a reputation in a niche. If you have zero, building one is probably a good step one.
- Professional network and access. Who can you reach that others can't?
- Institutional position. Where are you, and what does that let you do? Inside a lab, inside government, inside a university, inside an industry being transformed by AI?
- Geographic location. DC? London? SF? Brussels? Beijing? Nairobi? Somewhere else? 
- Unusual combinations of all the above and below. 
- Operational and organizational ability. Can you manage projects, hire people, run events, raise money, build organizations?
- Stage of career and positioning. 
- Can you go full-time on this? Or do you have 5 hours a week?
- Can you take a financial risk? Do you need stability? Can you self-fund a project for 6 months, or do you need a salary from day one?
- Your comparative advantage - what's the most impactful work where you already have an edge?

**Forcing questions to make you stop hedging.**
- Gun to your head: you can only work on one thing for the next 6 months. What is it? One thing. Write it down.
- You receive a $1M grant tomorrow. How do you spend it? You can fund yourself, fund others, start something, or support something that exists. Be specific!

**A few more:**
- It's 2030 and things have gone badly. An AI-related catastrophe has occurred (maybe we’re all dead). Looking back (just before you die), what do you wish you had started working on today?
- It's 2030 and things have gone well. Things are working better than expected. What happened, and what role did you play?
- Who are three people you should be talking to that you're not currently talking to?

**Given your answers above, set out what your next move is going to be:**
- A specific action you're going to take in the next 30 days. (Apply for X, reach out to Y, start learning Z, write a piece on W, start a Substack about V.)
- A 6-month plan for building toward a position where you can contribute. (If you're not yet positioned to do the work you identified, what's the path?)

Then bring in the red team (aka your discussion group, your friends, Claude). Ask them: What's the strongest argument that your plan is wrong? That the work you've identified isn't actually important, or that you're not actually well-positioned for it, or that there's something more impactful you're not seeing?


1. Make a doc (Google Doc, Proton, etc)
2. Sit down - block 1-2 hours - write out your answers to the questions above 
3. Make your doc shareable and give commenting access 
4. Share the link with your group 
5. Submit it below


Your Response

Use these to make your next step concrete. Fair warning: the career guides skew toward junior roles and the US.


Frontier AI Governance

The Proposal Landscape

Race Conditions, Power Concentration and Governance in the Limit