Early last year Longview Philanthropy invited me to attend an AI safety fundraising dinner they were hosting for Jane Street traders in Hong Kong as an expert guest. In the lead-up, I got on a call with them, and gave my honest opinions about their funding recommendations.

I summarized these opinions in a follow-up email to them at the time as "Overall I'm very excited about three of them ([redacted], [redacted], [redacted]), and moderately excited about most of the rest. But I'm pretty skeptical of some of the policy advocacy (particularly [redacted] and [redacted])." (Though it's possible I came across as more pessimistic in the call than I sound in this summary.)

As a result, they rescinded the invitation. It's not clear to me that they were wrong to do so, because my sense is that it's normal to prioritize bringing more sympathetic experts to such events. EDIT: Upon reflection, even if this would be normal in most philanthropic contexts, I want to hold organizations associated with AI safety to a much higher standard. I expect that selection effects like this one add up over time to give funders a distorted view of the ecosystem, and IMO a more virtuous fundraising process would find ways to mitigate them—e.g. as the AI Futures Project did by asking me to release a critique of their scenario. I expect this kind of virtue would, if widely adopted, add up to make the AI safety ecosystem much healthier. (To Longview's credit, they were interested in talking further about my criticisms privately, which I didn't end up getting around to due to busyness.)

I wanted to share this anecdote primarily to give people a better sense of the kinds of dynamics that block information flows in the AI safety community. As another example of such dynamics, I've redacted the names of the charities from my quote above because Longview asked me to treat their recommendations as confidential at the time (and as far as I can tell, they're still not public). However, I'm pretty skeptical that this kind of secrecy is healthy for a philanthropic organization.

EDIT: since I've edited the text above to take a stronger moral stance, I also want to clarify that I didn't hold my current opinions about the importance of transparency at the time, and called Longview's decision "very understandable" in an email to them. So I don't want this post to convey "I was wronged by Longview", but rather "we both participated in a dynamic that with the benefit of hindsight I consider to be unhealthy and worth describing publicly". I should have expressed that at the time, and if I had they may well have changed their minds.