Astral Codex Ten

Bret Taylor

3 min read

Bret Taylor

Article

Bret Taylor is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 28, 2023 and December 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Currently the provisional board is Bret Taylor”; “appointment of three mutually agreeable board members (Larry Summers, Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo)“. It most often appears alongside Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, Larry Summers.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 28, 2023
  • Last seen: December 05, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Open Philanthropy Project originally got one seat on the OpenAI board by supporting them when they were still a nonprofit; that later went to Helen Toner. I’m not sure how Tasha McCauley got her seat. Currently the provisional board is Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, and Larry Summers. Summers says he “believe[s] in effective altruism” but doesn’t seem AI-risk-pilled. Adam D’Angelo has never explicitly identified with EA or the AI risk movement but seems to have sided with the EAs in the recent fight so I’m not sure how to count him.
23
December 05, 2023 · Original source
The crisis ended with the appointment of three mutually agreeable board members (Larry Summers, Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo), who are supposed to seed a new full board to be picked later. I can’t find a market for who will be on this new board exactly. This one is for who will be on the board as of 1/1/24. Most forecasters don’t expect the new board to have been picked by then, but the few who do can give us some information about who they expect to be on it.
If D’Angelo is a safetyist, you could think of the compromise as follows: D’Angelo, a safetyist, picks two other safetyist board members. Bret Taylor, a profit-seeking Silicon Valley investor, picks two other profit-seeking Silicon Valley investors. And Summers, a random person who probably vaguely agrees with the idea of a nonprofit for the public good but doesn’t have strong ideological opinions, picks two other such people to be tiebreakers. This seems like the makings of a good mutually-agreeable solution.
Or it could have nothing to do with that. Maybe it wasn’t a Machiavellian factional decision at all. Bret Taylor was the head of the Twitter board that negotiated with Musk; people think he did a good job. He might just be “generic person who’s good at boards”. Larry Summers is also a generic person who’s probably good at boards. Adam D’Angelo could credibly claim to be the most moderate (neither explicitly an Altman pawn nor explicitly a safetyist) person on the last board, and if they were going for a board of moderates, he could be there to provide continuity.