The purpose of this post is to hopefully get some feedback, advice or even advisors, for how to optimize a business using rationalist principles. Background We are a team of three people running a small tech/AI company and currently dedicate the profits to: 1. Donate to AI alignment research. 2....
General Case Let's say I currently have 1M USD, and I can either: 1. Donate it to orgs working on AI alignment. 2. Invest the money and get returns >> than the stock market. How big must the expected return of my investment be in what time frame for it...
The purpose of this post is to hopefully get some feedback, advice or even advisors, for how to optimize a business using rationalist principles.
Background
We are a team of three people running a small tech/AI company and currently dedicate the profits to:
My intuition is that it should be possible to use rationalist principles of decision making, in order to create a scalable and replicable system for decision making, in order to successfully grow the business. We believe our chances of success will increase if we collaborate with external advisors well-versed in rationality.
Benefit of Becoming Our Advisor
I do think you make valid and reasonable points, and I appreciate and commemorate you for that.
Half on capabilities, half on alignment" might end up being neutral to net-negative.
Let's use 80000 hours conservative estimate that only around 5B usd is spent on capabilities each year, and 50M on AI alignment. That seems worse than 6B USD spent on capabilities, and 1.05B spent on AI alignment.
A half half approach in this case would 20X the alignment research, but only increase capabilities 20%.
high-variance strategy at this stage of the game
This I agree with, I have some ideas but will consult with experts in the field before pursuing any of them.
I expect that for most people, starting a new for-profit (or non-profit) AI alignment organization is likely to be net-negative for AI x-risk
While there are some examples of this, such as OpenAI, I still find this claim to be rather bold. If no one was starting AI alignment orgs we would still have roughly the same capabilities today, but only a fraction of the alignment research. Right now, over a hundred times more money is spent on advancing AI compared to reducing risks, so even a company spending half their resources advancing capabilites, and half on AI alignment, that seems net positive to me.
Your concern is justified however, so I will not proceed with any business plan without consulting several experts in the field first.
I would make sure to consult with experts regarding donation strategy/orgs to donate to, but would probably mostly be some of the orgs you mentioned, and perhaps some to the Long Term Future Fund.
General Case
Let's say I currently have 1M USD, and I can either:
1. Donate it to orgs working on AI alignment.
2. Invest the money and get returns >> than the stock market.
How big must the expected return of my investment be in what time frame for it to be better than donating right away?
My specific Case
I recently made around 1M USD pre tax, and consider how to best utilize it to decrease AI X-risk. I consider these two options: