Why does the AI safety community need help founding projects?

1. AI safety should scale
   1. Labs need external auditors for the AI control plan to work
   2. We should pursue many research bets in case superalignment/control fails
   3. Talent leaves MATS/ARENA and sometimes struggles to find meaningful work for mundane reasons, not for lack of talent or ideas
   4. Some emerging research agendas don’t have a home
   5. There are diminishing returns at scale for current AI safety teams; sometimes founding new projects is better than joining an existing team
   6. Scaling lab alignment teams are bottlenecked by management capacity, so their talent cut-off is above the level required to do “useful AIS work”
2. Research organizations (inc. nonprofits) are often more effective than independent researchers
   1. “Block funding model” is more efficient, as researchers can spend more time researching, rather than seeking grants, managing, or other traditional PI duties that can be outsourced
   2. Open source/collective projects often need a central rallying point (e.g., EleutherAI, dev interp at Timaeus, selection theorems and cyborgism agendas seem too delocalized, etc.)
3. There is (imminently) a market for for-profit AI safety companies and value-aligned people should capture this free energy or let worse alternatives flourish
   1. If labs or API users are made legally liable for their products, they will seek out external red-teaming/auditing consultants to prove they “made a reasonable attempt” to mitigate harms
   2. If government regulations require labs to seek external auditing, there will be a market for many types of companies
   3. “Ethical AI” companies might seek out interpretability or bias/fairness consultants
4. New AI safety organizations struggle to get funding and co-founders despite having good ideas
   1. AIS researchers are usually not experienced entrepeneurs (e.g., don’t know how to write grant proposals for EA funders, pitch decks for VCs, manage/hire new team members, etc.)
   2. There are not many competent start-up founders in the EA/AIS community and when they join, they don’t know what is most impactful to help
   3. Creating a centralized resource for entrepeneurial education/consulting and co-founder pairing would solve these problems

I am a Manifund Regrantor. In addition to general grantmaking, I have requests for proposals in the following areas:

• Funding for AI safety PhDs (e.g., with these supervisors), particularly in exploratory research connecting AI safety theory with empirical ML research.
• An AI safety PhD advisory service that helps prospective PhD students choose a supervisor and topic (similar to Effective Thesis, but specialized for AI safety).
• Initiatives to critically examine current AI safety macrostrategy (e.g., as articulated by Holden Karnofsky) like the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest and Future Fund Worldview Prize.
• Initiatives to identify and develop "Connectors" outside of academia (e.g., a reboot of the Refine program, well-scoped contests, long-term mentoring and peer-support programs).
• Physical community spaces for AI safety in AI hubs outside of the SF Bay Area or London (e.g., Japan, France, Bangalore).
• Start-up incubators for projects, including evals/red-teaming/interp companies, that aim to benefit AI safety, like Catalyze Impact, Future of Life Foundation, and YCombinator's request for Explainable AI start-ups.
• Initiatives to develop and publish expert consensus on AI safety macrostrategy cruxes, such as the Existential Persuasion Tournament and 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI (e.g., via the Delphi method, interviews, surveys, etc.).
• Ethics/prioritization research into:
  • What values to instill in artificial superintelligence?
  • How should AI-generated wealth be distributed?
  • What should people do in a post-labor society?
  • What level of surveillance/restriction is justified by the Unilateralist's Curse?
  • What moral personhood will digital minds have?
  • How should nations share decision making power regarding transformative AI?
• New nonprofit startups that aim to benefit AI safety.

Hi! Yes, MATS is always open to newbies, though our bar has raised significantly over the last few years. AISF is great, but I would also recommend completing ARENA or ML4Good courses if you are pursuing a technical project, or completing an AI gov research project.

It seems plausible to me that if AGI progress becomes strongly bottlenecked on architecture design or hyperparameter search, a more "genetic algorithm"-like approach will follow. Automated AI researchers could run and evaluate many small experiments in parallel, covering a vast hyperparameter space.

LISA's current leadership team consists of an Operations Director (Mike Brozowski) and a Research Director (James Fox). LISA is hiring for a new CEO role; there has never been a LISA CEO.

How fast should the field of AI safety grow? An attempt at grounding this question in some predictions.

• Ryan Greenblatt seems to think we can get a 30x speed-up in AI R&D using near-term, plausibly safe AI systems; assume every AIS researcher can be 30x’d by Alignment MVPs
• Tom Davidson thinks we have <3 years from 20%-AI to 100%-AI; assume we have ~3 years to align AGI with the aid of Alignment MVPs
• Assume the hardness of aligning TAI is equivalent to the Apollo Program (90k engineer/scientist FTEs x 9 years = 810k FTE-years); therefore, we need ~9k more AIS technical researchers
• The technical AIS field is currently ~500 people; at the current growth rate of 28% per year, it will take 12 years to grow to 9k people (Oct 2036)
• Alternatively, if we bound by the Manhattan Project (25k FTEs x 5 years = 125 FTE-years), this will take 6.5 years (Jul 2031)
• Metaculus predicts weak AGI in 2026 and strong AGI in 2030; clearly, more talent development is needed if we want to make the Nov 2030 AGI deadline!
• If we want to make the 9k researchers goal by Nov 2030 AGI deadline, we need an annual growth rate of 65%, 2.3x the current growth rate of 28%

Ah, that's a mistake. Our bad.

Crucial questions for AI safety field-builders:

• What is the most important problem in your field? If you aren't working on it, why?
• Where is everyone else dropping the ball and why?
• Are you addressing a gap in the talent pipeline?
• What resources are abundant? What resources are scarce? How can you turn abundant resources into scarce resources?
• How will you know you are succeeding? How will you know you are failing?
• What is the "user experience" of my program?
• Who would you copy if you could copy anyone? How could you do this?
• Am I better than the counterfactual?
• Who are your clients? What do they want?

Additional resources, thanks to Avery:

• COT Scaling implies slower takeoff speeds (Zoellner - 10 min)
• o1: A Technical Primer (Hoogland - 20 min)
• Unpacking o1 and the Path to AGI (Brown - up to 8:38)
• Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters (Deepmind, Snell - 20 min to skim)
• Speculations on Test-Time Scaling (Rush - from 4:25 to 21:25, 17 min total)

And 115 prospective mentors applied for Summer 2025!