“How useful is the information you get from working inside an AI company?” by Buck, Anders Cairns Woodruff

This post was drafted by Buck, and substantially edited by Anders. "I" refers to Buck. Thanks to Alex Mallen for comments. People who work inside AI companies get access to information that I only get later or never. Quantitatively, how big a deal is this access? Here's an operationalization of this. Consider the following two ways my knowledge could be augmented: I get a crystal ball that tells me all the information I would know n months in the future.I become an employee of a frontier AI company (like OpenAI or Anthropic), with access to all the private information I’d normally get from working at that company. How big would n have to be for me to be indifferent between these two options, from the perspective of learning things that are helpful for making AI go well? The answer is presumably different for me than for many readers, because I’m a reasonably well-connected researcher; I see published information and news from the rumor mill and I talk to researchers at frontier AI companies all the time. (Researchers I know through AI safety usually only tell me information that their employer would approve of, but other researchers occasionally [...] ---Outline:(03:00) What do insiders know?(04:14) Safety work and corporate attitudes(05:34) Model capabilities(07:07) Algorithms and architecture(09:29) How will this change over time?(12:07) Conclusion The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/84TtjdeLcDTtCLYaP/how-useful-is-the-information-you-get-from-working-inside-an-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.