TL;DR
Astral Codex Ten’s Open Thread 456 is a weekly community post covering local meetup changes, a Boston election guide and surveys about AI safety grantmaking. It also highlights MNX, a real-money prediction market focused on AI, and Common Notes, a project combining AI-generated notes with user contributions and ratings.
Astral Codex Ten has published Open Thread 456, its weekly community post for reader discussion, with notices on local meetups, a Boston-area election guide, AI grantmaking research and two projects focused on AI or online information. The post also flags an upcoming Bay Area meetup and a survey asking people familiar with AI safety and grantmaking to rate potential accomplishments.
The post describes itself as a weekly open thread where readers can discuss any topic or ask questions. It points readers to the blog’s unofficial subreddit, Discord, bulletin board and in-person meetups. The author also lists meetup changes in Rockville, Northampton, Eindhoven, Great Barrington, Cairo, Portland and Sofia, directing readers to the post for details.
The Boston ACX meetup group has completed a Greater Boston general-election voting guide, according to the post. The author says additional guides may follow and that they are still working out whether one can be prepared for the Bay Area. The post separately gives a reminder about the San Francisco mail-in ballot registration deadline, described as the end of that Monday, and names Scott Wiener for Congress as the group’s main San Francisco endorsement. These are statements in the post; it does not provide the guide’s recommendations or explain the process behind them.
The author is continuing work on modeling aspects of AI grantmaking and is seeking survey responses from people with experience in AI and grantmaking. The survey asks respondents to assign utility weights to about 80 AI safety accomplishments. A second version asks participants to predict how the author would answer the first survey, with the stated aim of distinguishing differences in worldview from random variation in how people assign weights.
Community Work Meets AI Funding
The post brings together several activities that otherwise reach different audiences: local events and election resources for ACX readers, and research into how AI safety grants might be evaluated. The survey could contribute information to the author’s effort to model grantmaking judgments, but the post does not say that the survey will directly determine funding decisions or that an automated system is ready.
Two highlighted projects also speak to debates about information and forecasting. MNX, described as a real-money prediction market on AI, offers contracts tied to AI company stocks and revenues, as well as targets connected to the Epoch Capabilities Index. Common Notes is presented as a system for adding community-style notes across websites. Both could give users new ways to assess claims or expectations, but the post provides no performance results, adoption figures or independent evaluation.
For readers, the immediate practical value is local: meetup changes, a voting guide and a scheduled San Francisco gathering. The broader interest lies in seeing how members of the ACX community are trying to structure judgments about AI progress and public information. The post is a roundup, not a detailed report on the effectiveness of any of these initiatives.
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A Weekly ACX Community Roundup
Astral Codex Ten publishes open threads as spaces for readers to post about topics of their choice. Open Thread 456 follows that format while adding a series of announcements from the blog’s community and people associated with it. The post says most blog content is free, with some material available to subscribers.
The thread refers readers to earlier work on modeling AI grantmaking, but the supplied post does not describe those efforts in detail. It frames the new survey as part of ongoing work and says that automation is a possibility for the future, not a completed feature. The author requests responses from people well-versed in both AI and grantmaking.
The local notices are also time-sensitive. The post schedules a Bay Area ACX meetup for Saturday, October 24, at 1 p.m. at Mox, 1680 Mission Street in San Francisco. It calls the announcement an early heads-up and says a separate post may follow. Because the thread’s publication date is not stated in the material provided, the year and the current status of that event cannot be confirmed here.
“I am continuing to work on modeling (and maybe one day automating) some parts of AI grantmaking.”
— Astral Codex Ten’s author, in Open Thread 456
Survey Results and Project Details
The post does not report survey findings, a response target, a closing date or a method for selecting participants. It says the survey is intended for people familiar with AI and grantmaking, but does not specify how responses will be weighted or whether the results will be published. The proposed separation between worldview differences and random noise is described as the goal of the alternate survey; no results are presented.
Details are also limited for MNX and Common Notes. The post does not provide market rules, regulatory information, user numbers or evidence about the accuracy of forecasts or notes. Its observation that Polymarket and MNX were still pricing Anthropic at around $2 trillion, despite talk of a fall from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion, is a time-specific comparison reported by the author; the post does not identify the underlying contract terms or provide a timestamp for those prices.
The meetup notices and election-related information may have changed since publication. The source material does not give the article’s publication date, and it does not include the full local meetup changes, the voting guide itself, or confirmation of whether the planned Bay Area event took place.
Responses, Meetups and Follow-Up Posts
The author is asking qualified readers to complete the AI safety accomplishments survey and, if they have time, its alternate version. The thread does not set a deadline or promise when analysis will be released. Readers interested in local events are directed to the post for meetup changes, while the author says a separate notice for the San Francisco gathering may be forthcoming.
The author also says more election guides may appear in the following week and that work is continuing on whether a Bay Area guide is possible. For MNX and Common Notes, the thread points readers to the projects themselves rather than announcing a formal launch timeline, evaluation or next milestone. Further information would be needed to establish how these tools develop and whether the survey informs later grantmaking models.
Key Questions
What is Open Thread 456?
It is a weekly Astral Codex Ten community thread inviting readers to discuss any topic, alongside notices about meetups, election resources and projects.
What does the AI grantmaking survey ask?
It asks people familiar with AI and grantmaking to assign utility weights to about 80 AI safety accomplishments. An alternate survey asks respondents to predict how the author would answer the first one.
What is MNX?
According to the post, MNX is a real-money prediction market focused on AI, with markets related to AI company stocks, revenues and Epoch Capabilities Index targets. The post does not provide further operating or regulatory details.
When and where is the Bay Area meetup?
The thread lists it for Saturday, October 24, at 1 p.m. at Mox, 1680 Mission Street in San Francisco. The publication year is not given in the supplied material, so the event’s current status cannot be established from the post alone.
What is Common Notes?
The post describes it as a Goodheart Labs project intended to add community-style notes across websites. It says the system combines AI-written notes, user contributions and votes, with a browser extension to display them.
Source: rss
