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The LessWrong Team is now Lightcone Infrastructure, come work with us!

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2021·LessWrong·lesswrong.com/posts/eR7Su77N2nK3e5YRZ/the-lesswrong-team-...

Author

habryka

Credibility Rating

3/5
Good(3)

Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.

Rating inherited from publication venue: LessWrong

Organizational announcement relevant to understanding the institutional landscape supporting AI safety research communities; Lightcone Infrastructure maintains key communication platforms used by AI safety researchers.

Metadata

Importance: 28/100news

Summary

Announcement that the team behind LessWrong is rebranding as Lightcone Infrastructure, a nonprofit focused on supporting the AI safety research community. The post outlines the organization's expanded mission to build and maintain intellectual infrastructure for rationalist and EA communities, and includes a job listing for people interested in joining the effort.

Key Points

  • •LessWrong team rebrands to Lightcone Infrastructure to better reflect their broader mission beyond just the LessWrong platform.
  • •The organization positions itself as providing critical infrastructure for the AI safety and rationalist research communities.
  • •Lightcone Infrastructure manages multiple projects including LessWrong, the EA Forum, and physical spaces like the Lighthaven campus.
  • •The announcement doubles as a recruitment post, inviting people who care about AI safety and intellectual community-building to apply.
  • •The rebranding signals a more intentional focus on supporting the broader ecosystem of researchers working on existential risk reduction.

Cached Content Preview

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# The LessWrong Team is now Lightcone Infrastructure, come work with us!
By habryka
Published: 2021-10-01
*tl;dr: The LessWrong team is re-organizing as* [*Lightcone Infrastructure*](http://www.lightconeinfrastructure.com/)*. LessWrong is one of several projects we are working on to ensure the future of humanity goes well. We are looking to hire software engineers as well as generalist entrepreneurs in Berkeley who are excited to build infrastructure to ensure a good future.*

I founded the LessWrong 2.0 team in 2017, with the goal of reviving LessWrong.com and reinvigorating the intellectual culture of the rationality community. I believed the community had great potential for affecting the long term future, but that the failing website was a key bottleneck to community health and growth.

Four years later, the website still seems very important. But when I step back and ask “what are the key bottlenecks for improving the longterm future?”, just ensuring the website is going well no longer seems sufficient.

For the past year, I’ve been re-organizing the LessWrong team into something with a larger scope. As I’ve learned from talking to over a thousand of you over the last 4 years, for most of you the rationality community is much larger than just this website, and your contributions to the future of humanity more frequently than not route through many disparate parts of our sprawling diaspora. Many more of those parts deserve attention and optimization than just LessWrong, and we seem to be the best positioned organization to make sure that happens.

I want to make sure that that whole ecosystem is successfully steering humanity towards safer and better futures, and more and more this has meant working on projects that weren't directly related to LessWrong.com: 

*   A bit over a year ago we started building grant-making software for Jaan Tallinn and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, helping distribute over 30 million dollars to projects that I think have the potential to have a substantial effect on ensuring a flourishing future for humanity.
*   We helped run dozens of online meetups and events during the pandemic, and hundreds of in-person events for both this year and 2019s ACX Meetups everywhere
*   We helped build and run the EA Forum and the AI Alignment Forum,
*   We recently ran a 5-day retreat for 60-70 people whose work we think is highly impactful in reducing the likelihood of humanity's extinction,
*   We opened an in-person office space in the Bay Area for organizations that are working towards improving the long-term future of humanity.

As our projects outside of the LessWrong.com website multiplied, our name became more and more confusing when trying to explain to people what we were about. 

This confusion reached a new peak when we started having a team that we were internally calling the "LessWrong team", which was responsible for running the website, distinct from all of our other projects, and which soon after caused me to

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