person
Tom Davidson
Senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy
Economist at Open Philanthropy who wrote the influential 'explosive economic growth' analyses tying AI progress to economic takeoff modelling.
Profile
expertise
Policy / meta
Specialises in AI policy, regulation, governance, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Reads the technical literature but does not produce it.
Open Philanthropy senior research analyst. Compute-takeover-takeoff modelling. Forecaster; not a technical researcher.
recognition
Established
Reliable, recognised voice within their specific subfield. Cited and invited but not central to general AI discourse.
Recognised in safety/forecasting circles.
vintage
Scaling era
Worldview formed during GPT-2/3, scaling laws, Anthropic's founding. Pre-ChatGPT but post-deep-learning. The 'scale is all you need' debate is live.
Open Phil takeoff timelines from 2021. Scaling-era forecaster.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Existential primacyendorses
Extinction/disempowerment risk overrides ordinary cost-benefitArgues AI-driven economic takeoff would be discontinuous and that the institutional response space is narrow.
Standard economic growth models predict explosive growth once AI substitutes broadly for human cognition.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Tom Davidson's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.