For the record, our relationship to supporting events for this ecosystem is changing from something like “all of our resources are the same, here have my venue for free if you need it” to “markets and pricing are a great way for large masses of people to coordinate on the value of a good or service, let’s coordinate substantially via trade”.
For instance, during a previous cohort of SERI MATS scholars at the Lightcone Offices, I spent a couple of weeks of work adding a second floor and getting it furnished and doing interior design, hiring another support person to the office team, and then later on dealing with closing it down and downsizing when the demand went away. I did all of that for free, and was not paid salary or anything by MATS, it was part of my Lightcone work, because we wanted to support mentorship happening in the AI alignment ecosystem. It’s different this time around. They’re paying us a substantial amount of money (well over $100k) for the use of 2.5 of our nicely furnished and designed buildings for 2 months, an amount that makes the trade pretty good for Lightcone (and I hope+expect to work hard and make it worthwhile for SERI MATS too!). The other workshops Habryka has mentioned elsethread will also mostly be paying trade partners (general pricing TBD as we get a better sense of the demand).
I bring this up because the extent to which funds for Lightcone are spent supporting SERI MATS in particular (and other teams/orgs/events) is (I suspect) much less than you are thinking.
At least for the coming year, our expenses are pretty entangled between all the different projects in a way that makes differentially funding things hard. I do take preferences of our donors on how to focus our efforts into account, so donating and just telling us that you would prefer us to work more on one kind of thing vs. another will have some effect.
My guess is you will mostly just have to average our impact across different areas and decide whether the whole portfolio is above your bar.
There are things which I would be glad to support- like LW infra, and things that I’d prefer not to support, like SERI. What are my options?
For the record, our relationship to supporting events for this ecosystem is changing from something like “all of our resources are the same, here have my venue for free if you need it” to “markets and pricing are a great way for large masses of people to coordinate on the value of a good or service, let’s coordinate substantially via trade”.
For instance, during a previous cohort of SERI MATS scholars at the Lightcone Offices, I spent a couple of weeks of work adding a second floor and getting it furnished and doing interior design, hiring another support person to the office team, and then later on dealing with closing it down and downsizing when the demand went away. I did all of that for free, and was not paid salary or anything by MATS, it was part of my Lightcone work, because we wanted to support mentorship happening in the AI alignment ecosystem. It’s different this time around. They’re paying us a substantial amount of money (well over $100k) for the use of 2.5 of our nicely furnished and designed buildings for 2 months, an amount that makes the trade pretty good for Lightcone (and I hope+expect to work hard and make it worthwhile for SERI MATS too!). The other workshops Habryka has mentioned elsethread will also mostly be paying trade partners (general pricing TBD as we get a better sense of the demand).
I bring this up because the extent to which funds for Lightcone are spent supporting SERI MATS in particular (and other teams/orgs/events) is (I suspect) much less than you are thinking.
At least for the coming year, our expenses are pretty entangled between all the different projects in a way that makes differentially funding things hard. I do take preferences of our donors on how to focus our efforts into account, so donating and just telling us that you would prefer us to work more on one kind of thing vs. another will have some effect.
My guess is you will mostly just have to average our impact across different areas and decide whether the whole portfolio is above your bar.