Open Thread 450

Astral Codex Ten · collected 2026-09-07 · by Scott Alexander commentary
Read the original at Astral Codex Ten ↗

Summary

ACX's weekly open thread allows users to post about anything they want. There is no concrete news report in this article, but rather announcements and updates from various individuals and organizations associated with the community. ACX Reader Survey closes by the end of the week, and there are job openings at Apollo Research and Ovelle Bio.
Written by the local model on 2026-09-07, using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the same event (that is the story summary below).

Signals How these are calculated →

Claims extracted
27
claim-shaped sentences
Uncertain
4%
1 of 27 hedged
Leaning
not political
takes no side on a contested political question
Publisher trust
not scored
Commentary is not rated for newsroom trust
Outlets on this story
1
Technology
Narrative spread
1
articles carrying this framing
Analyzed 2026-09-07 · how these are computed

AI analysis (generated at analysis time, not now)

Story summary

A group called Apollo Research is hiring for various positions related to artificial intelligence (AI) development and security. They have job openings in London and San Francisco, with sponsored visas available. The roles include Engineering Manager (Product), Full-Stack Software Engineer, and others such as Research Scientist (Control), AI Red Team Engineer, and Security Engineer. Apollo Research works with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and their product Watcher monitors billions of AI tokens per month. To signal this job opportunity, they asked the author to spread the word through his platform.

Written for “Open Thread 450” on 2026-09-07, grounded in this article and the 0 other(s) covering the same event.
Why this leaning score
This article does not take a side on a contested political question, so it has no leaning score. That is an answer rather than a gap: a match report or a rescue can be warmly or critically written without being left or right, and scoring it anyway is how approval of a subject gets recorded as a political position.
No political leaning scored for article 6663 · logged 2026-09-07

Story

📰 Open Thread 450
Technology · 1 article(s) covering the same event. This is the one the site leads with.

How this is being covered How these are calculated →

Article leaning vs. publisher reliability
Source leaning vs. consistency

Compared with similar articles

Nothing to compare against. No article is close enough to this one for the pipeline to have linked or judged the pair.

Publisher

Astral Codex Ten · 30 article(s) · 2 correction(s) detected
No corrections detected for this publisher. That may mean careful reporting, or simply that nothing has been checked.

Who wrote this

Scott Alexander
29 article(s) here · 1 carrying a prediction
🔮 At Ovelle, you will help make eggs abundant, thereby solving infertility, unlocking further advances in reproductive technology, and supporting the flourishing of future generations.
2026-09-07 · assertive framing · Open Thread 450
🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done.
2026-09-04 · assertive framing · Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji
🔮 We don’t even need for there to be a crash to make improvements – we test proactively, we build in redundancy, and we monitor for deviations which could be a threat.
2026-09-03 · assertive framing · Nicholas Decker In Hell
🔮 Content warning: the first part of this review contains medical details that some people might find gruesome; I am bad at judging these things since I can no longer feel disgust or fear myself, and have tried to err on the side of completeness.
2026-09-03 · assertive framing · Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy
🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done.
🔮 This year’s survey will probably take 30 - 45 minutes.
2026-08-27 · assertive framing · Take The 2026 ACX Survey
🔮 It’s not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they’re dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it.
🔮 I don’t know, but he may have misinterpreted my original tweet as saying income doesn’t matter at all, in which case this data functions as an effective rebuttal.
2026-08-25 · assertive framing · Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness
🔮 [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done.
🔮 Matt says his highest priority colleges that don’t have an organizer yet are MIT, Claremont, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Amherst, Notre Dame, Duke, CalTech, Georgetown, UCLA, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Harvard, NYU, Williams, GWU, American University, Rutgers, and UNC Chapel Hill.
2026-08-24 · assertive framing · Open Thread 448
More on this subject from Scott Alexander
Open Thread 445
2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten · 98% similar
Open Thread 446
2026-08-18 · Astral Codex Ten · 98% similar
Open Thread 448
2026-08-24 · Astral Codex Ten · 98% similar
Open Thread 449
2026-08-31 · Astral Codex Ten · 98% similar
All 29 articles by Scott Alexander →

Topics

ACX ACX Reader Survey Apollo Binghamton Discord

Subjects

ACX ORG · 2× Apollo ORG · 2× ACX Reader Survey ORG · 1× Binghamton GPE · 1× Discord ORG · 1× Duke ORG · 1× Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra ORG · 1× University of British Columbia ORG · 1× University of Maryland ORG · 1× University of Tokyo ORG · 1×

Narrative

Roles are open in both London and San Francisco, in person, visas sponsored: Engineering Manager (Product), Full-Stack Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Security Engineer, Research Scientist (Control), AI Red Team Engineer, AI Security & Control Researcher, AI Security Researcher, and Security Engineer.
framing: assertive · carried by 1 article(s) · first seen 2026-09-07
🔮 At Ovelle, you will help make eggs abundant, thereby solving infertility, unlocking further advances in reproductive technology, and supporting the flourishing of future generations.
2026-09-07 · Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 450 · assertive framing

Claims (27 extracted, 1 hedged)

Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. asserted
you → post → questions
ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. asserted
ACX → have → world
Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. asserted
you → subscribe → ?
I’ll probably close it around the end of this week. asserted
I → close → week
And new meetups added at University of British Columbia, University of Tokyo, and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. asserted
meetups → add → Tokyo
Apollo Research, a group “focused on reducing risks from scheming frontier AI”, asks me to signal-boost some job openings: asserted
Research → focus → openings
Apollo is hiring across product, control research, and internal security. asserted
Apollo → hire → product
Apollo works with frontier AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and builds Watcher, a coding agent security product deployed in production and monitoring billions of agent tokens per month. asserted
Apollo → work → month
Roles are open in both London and San Francisco, in person, visas sponsored: Engineering Manager (Product), Full-Stack Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Security Engineer, Research Scientist (Control), AI Red Team Engineer, AI Security & Control Researcher, AI Security Researcher, and Security Engineer. asserted
visas → sponsor → Manager
A formal AI safety background is not required for the security and product roles. asserted
background → require → roles
Applications are rolling, apply here. asserted
Applications → roll → ?
4: Friend of the blog and ACX Grants evaluator Metacelsus (of De Novo) asks me to advertise a position at his reproductive technology startup: asserted
Metacelsus → ask → startup
Ovelle Bio, a startup working on growing human eggs from stem cells, is hiring for a stem cell biologist position: https://ovelle.bio/careers/stem-cell-scientist/ . asserted
Bio → work → position
At Ovelle, you will help make eggs abundant, thereby solving infertility, unlocking further advances in reproductive technology, and supporting the flourishing of future generations. asserted
eggs → help → generations
This position is based in Boston and requires a PhD or equivalent experience in mammalian cell culture and molecular biology, but we primarily value scientific creativity, adaptability, and passion for solving impactful problems. asserted
we → base → problems
Those interested can apply at the link above. asserted
Those → apply → link
Like many of you, I enjoyed the reader book review of Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais. asserted
I → enjoy → Rabelais
I wasn’t expecting this to become important context for breaking news in AI, but evaluation site Vals - which tests new models against real-world problems - asserted
which → expect → problems
recently reported that the new Claude Fable 5.1 demonstrated its cryptography chops by decoding a famous 370-year-old unsolved cipher by Thomas Urquhart. asserted
Fable → report → Urquhart
ACX animal welfare grantee Robert Yaman of Innovate Animal Ag (see also his blog, The Optimist’s Barn) asks me to signal boost a job opening for his new project: asserted
me → see → project
We are hiring a Head of Instrumentation & AI, roughly a founding CTO for a hardware-and-data research program. asserted
We → hire → program
The poultry industry has always struggled to get high-quality commercial data, and nothing is harder to measure than welfare: most of what’s known rests on small university studies that take years and don’t resemble real production. asserted
that → struggle → production
New AI tools around continuous sensing, machine vision, and robotics are making it possible to measure welfare bird by bird in a working commercial flock and run rigorous experiments against those measurements. asserted
it → make → measurements
The job is to build this new AI-native tech stack for animal welfare. asserted
job → build → welfare
They want a technical generalist with 0-to-1 experience; hardware or physical-AI background is a plus, and you don’t need to know anything about chickens. asserted
you → want → chickens
Details and how to apply here. Note that this involves some level of cooperation with factory farms’ profit motive to improve conditions on the margin, and different animal advocates may have different opinions on whether this is net positive and/or deontologically permissible. uncertain
this → apply → opinions
I haven’t made up my mind, so I include this here to let you make your own decisions. asserted
you → make → decisions
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