I finished Inkhaven

I managed to write 30 posts in 30 days

It was quite the experience, pretty stressful most of the time, but it was a really good thing to have done. I had a lot of cool conversations, some of them recorded. One of those recorded conversations is already public, and I think about publishing more of them. I also recorded conversations on anthropic reasoning and AI’s impacts on privacy which are not out yet. The conversation with Adria focused on the difficulty of the alignment problem. I think it turned out well. You can watch it here: Will We Get Alignment by Default?

I’m more convinced than before that it’s a very good idea to write things down to get your point of view out there. Increasingly I think that being good at writing is just as much of an edge as coding, even if that might have appeared absurd in the past. The field might have changed here. Coding assistants make coding less of an edge in research.

The Lighthaven office itself is wonderful as always. A really good place to work where you can sit outside and have sunlight while you work.

Looking back at it all, there’s one point of criticism. I was often really stressed out at the end of the day. I had trouble coming up with an idea and then only late got to start working on something. As result, my writing was only done just before I had to submit it. One of the big advantages of the Inkhaven facilities is that you’re able to give your draft to other people who hang around, and there’s a person assigned to you who will help you with editing. But you can’t really use that if you just submit it right before going to bed.

So something that could perhaps help in the future: a stack system where you don’t submit a post on the first day, but prepare it for review by end of day. It gets reviewed, then on the second day you also start writing the next post and edit the last post based on the review. That way you always have one post in review and one in the draft stage. A lot of other people also struggled with getting posts out in time, so maybe there’s something that could be optimized there.

Another thing that was increasingly useful: at Lighthaven there’s a super useful room where you can sit down and record conversations at pretty high quality without much setup. Final editing mostly just consisted of muting the inactive speaker’s microphone. You could do more professional stuff like switching between cameras, which I didn’t bother with. But it’s actually pretty good if you just edit the audio and cut out some parts. You can really quickly produce a video. That’s a great thing to have, and maybe other AI safety co-working spaces should have something similar.

One really cool thing was the Bodega Bay trip, a short group outing we took during the workshop. It was pretty sunny that weekend and we were able to go to the Pacific beach.

Inkhaven was a great experience and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in writing more but also for improving research. It’s also a good way to see and experience the Lighthaven office.