Appreciate you asking these questions! I don't know much about the specifics of pdku, but have thought a little bit about AI safety video creation from a grantmaking perspective, eg this shallow dive and having helped incept and fundraise for the first batch of Frame Fellowship. Some quick takes:

1. I think my prior is "more AI safety video creation seems obviously good / cost effective". From an ecosystem perspective, we're funding a ton of TAIS researcher upskilling (MATS Bluedot 80k etc) to the tune of $100m/y, and much less video creation. So I think throwing money at video creation seems reasonable
   1. I also like throwing money at text creation (eg blogs, books). And music and art! Making good media seems like a classic public good, a problem for philanthropy to tackle
2. An average of $14k per fellow for 1mo, seems not crazy, though I might have suggested that more of that funding go to the fellows directly, and/or to extend the length of time of the program (eg 4 => 6 or 8 weeks), since there's a lot of fixed overhead costs of organizing a single batch.
3. A lot of the benefits of a fellowship take time to yield fruit. To draw an analogy, for MATS, some of the wins are not the research produced during, but rather something like "helping Marius Hobbhahn get to a place to start Apollo or Jesse Hoogland to start Timaeus, a year+ later"
4. To a first order approximation, cG doesn't fund AI safety video creation due to strategic uncertainty, which means, insofar as it's valuable, Lightcone Commons et al might want to prioritize it more
5. I think having this kind of conversation in public is great and appreciate Josh posting these things in public, and wish more of Lightcone Commons was set up for public discourse
6. I'm not sure that fellowships are actually the best way to fund video creation; video creation actually seems quite well set up for prizes, since the outputs are easy to verify. So someone could organize a large creator prize for AI safety videos without requiring any in person travel/batch, and maybe pay + fly out the winners to some kind of one-week in person event to get some of the mixing/cohort benefits.
7. But overall a portfolio approach makes sense, more dakka, I think generally trying to turn money into outcomes is good, even if many end up not being good. Media/video is especially hits-based.
8. Insofar as we are worrying about costs, I would worry more about the opportunity costs of the organizers/fellows/Lighthaven, rather than the $ amount being spent, given relative abundance of $ and scarcity of talent.

I think it's bad to scrutinize someone who does a (counterfactually & in expectation) good thing for not doing the maximally good version.

But if they're misleading in their communication of the outcomes like this, it seems good to scrutinize what they did.

Also seems like you did useful analysis of the outcomes and also have brought up seemingly smart suggestions in good faith. I appreciate question number 2, and it would be disappointing if there was good reason to update and people failed to do that.

I'm kinda confused by this post. Like it's hard to even think about it directly, it feels slippery, and my guess is that our worldviews on this diverge in some really deep way that makes everything downstream of it more confusing for me?

My impression from talking to you before is that you're primaily distressed we're not explicitly incentivizing x-risk content, and most of the complaints are downstream of that?

I believe I've already said a few times that I strongly don't think explicitly incentivizing AI content is a good idea, at least not for the vision I have. A verison that was about incentivizing it would be entirely a different thing, and not something I'd be excited about (although might be still worthwhile for someone else to run). I think this primarily because I have very strong intuitions around how creativity works, and that you cannot foster really genuine novelty around something by trying to capture it too directly.

There's a lot of benefit we've gotten from PDKU that's behind the scenes, and are things I didn't anticipate would happen. This is cool, and feels sort of the goal of 'doing lateral stuff and seeing what falls out.' This category of thing is very high-variance and hard to predict. I do think a lot of this is a 'just trust me bro' intuition thing on my part. I don't blame people if they don't want to trust me, I think it would be reasonable not to! But I do have a pretty good track record of going viral, and building things lots of people use, and developing networks useful for x-risk stuff that likely wouldn't have happened otherwise. And, as I believe I've mentioned to you before, I would never ever have gotten to where I am today, and I would be much less useless overall, if I'd tried to buckle down and make exactly the thing I thought I was supposed to be making from the get-go.

Fwiw, I personally am running a second, different, not publicly-advertised thing based off and using networks from PDKU, that I would not have been able to do without PDKU, and this one is significantly more goal-oriented. I only find the goal-oriented nature of this one hopeful because the ingredients were selected from wild garden of PDKU.

But yea idk if i'm repeating myself here but just. I think we have very wildly different models of how success works here. Idk, have you ever like, done an expedition? Like "Okay there's a bunch of jungle over there and I don't really know the way forward but to start let's just plow in and start waving our machete around"? And certainly you miss some important stuff, and it's inefficient, but the point is other people are already trying nice methods where they slowly lay down some nice and even asphalt in a straight line, and sure you could also get some asphalt, but your goal here isn't to figure out how to lay asphalt slightly faster it's to fucking figure out how to get through this forest as fast as possible, with a new method. And you did find a bunch of fruit that's turning out to be useful, and you suspect this means you're going the right direction - and maybe you're not! - but you think somebody here should be doing something besides the conventional route to at least find out.

I think if we ran another PDKU and it didn't result in the same level of unexpected fruit, I wouldn't want to run it a third time. I think it's very probably worth running a second time.