There currently doesn’t really exist any good way for people who want to contribute to AI existential risk reduction to give money in a way that meaningfully gives them assistance in figuring out what things are good to fund. This is particularly sad since I think there is now a huge amount of interest from funders and philanthropists who want to somehow help with AI x-risk stuff, as progress in capabilities has made work in the space a lot more urgent, but the ecosystem is currently at a particular low-point in terms of trust and ability to direct that funding towards productive ends.
Really? What’s the holdup here exactly? How is it still hard to give funders a decent up-to-date guide to the ecosystem, or a knowledgeable contact person, at this stage? For a workable budget version today, can’t people just get a link to this and then contact orgs they’re interested in?
I think a lot of projects in the space are very high variance, and some of them are actively deceptive, and I think that really means you want a bunch of people with context to do due diligence and think hard about the details. This includes some projects that Zvi recommends here, though I do think Zvi’s post is overall great and provides a lot of value.
Another big component is doing fair splitting. I think many paths to impact require getting 4-5 pieces in place, and substantial capital investment, and any single donor might feel that there isn’t really any chance for them to fund things in a way that gets the whole engine going, and before they feel good giving they want to know that other people will actually put in the other funds necessary to make things work. That’s a lot of what our work on the S-Process and Lightspeed Grants was solving.
In-general, the philanthropy space is dominated by very hard principal-agent problems. If you have a lot of money, you will have tons of people trying to get your money, most of them for bad reasons. Creating infrastructure to connect high net worth people with others who are actually trustworthy and want to put in a real effort to help them is quite hard (especially in a way that results in the high net-worth people then actually building justified trust in those people).
Really? What’s the holdup here exactly? How is it still hard to give funders a decent up-to-date guide to the ecosystem, or a knowledgeable contact person, at this stage? For a workable budget version today, can’t people just get a link to this and then contact orgs they’re interested in?
I think a lot of projects in the space are very high variance, and some of them are actively deceptive, and I think that really means you want a bunch of people with context to do due diligence and think hard about the details. This includes some projects that Zvi recommends here, though I do think Zvi’s post is overall great and provides a lot of value.
Another big component is doing fair splitting. I think many paths to impact require getting 4-5 pieces in place, and substantial capital investment, and any single donor might feel that there isn’t really any chance for them to fund things in a way that gets the whole engine going, and before they feel good giving they want to know that other people will actually put in the other funds necessary to make things work. That’s a lot of what our work on the S-Process and Lightspeed Grants was solving.
In-general, the philanthropy space is dominated by very hard principal-agent problems. If you have a lot of money, you will have tons of people trying to get your money, most of them for bad reasons. Creating infrastructure to connect high net worth people with others who are actually trustworthy and want to put in a real effort to help them is quite hard (especially in a way that results in the high net-worth people then actually building justified trust in those people).