My personal take is that projects where the funder is actively excited about them and understands the work and wants frequent reports tend to get stuff done faster… And considering the circumstances, faster seems good. So I’d recommend supporting something you find interesting and inspiring, and then keep on top of it.
In terms of groups which have their eyes on a variety of unusual and underfunded projects, I recommend both the Foresight Institute and AE Studio.
In terms of specific individuals/projects that are doing novel and interesting things, which are low on funding… (Disproportionately representing ones I’m involved with since those are the ones I know about)...
Self-Other Overlap (AE studio)
Brain-like AI safety (Stephen Byrnes, or me (very different agenda from Stephen’s, focusing on modularity for interpretability rather than on Stephen’s idea about reproducing human empathy circuits))
Deep exploration of the nature and potential of LLMs (Upward Spiral Research, particularly Janus aka repligate)
Decentralized AI Governance for mutual safety compacts (me, and ??? surely someone else is working on this)
Pre-training on rigorous ethical rulesets, plus better cleaning of pretraining data (Erik Passoja, Sean Pan, and me)
this one I feel like would best be tackled in the context of a large lab that can afford to do many experimental pre-training runs on smallish models, but there seems to be a disconnect between safety researchers at big labs who are focused on post-training stuff versus this agenda which focuses more on pre-training.
My personal take is that projects where the funder is actively excited about them and understands the work and wants frequent reports tend to get stuff done faster… And considering the circumstances, faster seems good. So I’d recommend supporting something you find interesting and inspiring, and then keep on top of it.
In terms of groups which have their eyes on a variety of unusual and underfunded projects, I recommend both the Foresight Institute and AE Studio.
In terms of specific individuals/projects that are doing novel and interesting things, which are low on funding… (Disproportionately representing ones I’m involved with since those are the ones I know about)...
Self-Other Overlap (AE studio)
Brain-like AI safety (Stephen Byrnes, or me (very different agenda from Stephen’s, focusing on modularity for interpretability rather than on Stephen’s idea about reproducing human empathy circuits))
Deep exploration of the nature and potential of LLMs (Upward Spiral Research, particularly Janus aka repligate)
Decentralized AI Governance for mutual safety compacts (me, and ??? surely someone else is working on this)
Pre-training on rigorous ethical rulesets, plus better cleaning of pretraining data (Erik Passoja, Sean Pan, and me)
this one I feel like would best be tackled in the context of a large lab that can afford to do many experimental pre-training runs on smallish models, but there seems to be a disconnect between safety researchers at big labs who are focused on post-training stuff versus this agenda which focuses more on pre-training.