If MIRI would want to hire someone like Terence Tao for a million dollars per year they likely couldn’t simply do that out of their normal budget. To do this they would need to convince donors to give them additional money for that purpose.
If there would be a general sense that this would be the way forward in MIRI and MIRI could express that to donors, I would expect they would get the donor money for it.
They would need to compete with lots of other projects working on AI Alignment. But yes, I fundamentally agree: if there was a project that convincingly had a >1% chance of solving AI alignment it seems very likely it would be able to raise ~1M/year (maybe even ~10?)
They would need to compete with lots of other projects working on AI Alignment.
I don’t think that’s the case. I think that if OpenPhil would believe that there’s more room for funding in promising AI alignment research they would spend more money on it than they currently do.
I think the main reason that they aren’t giving MIRI more money than they are giving, is that they don’t believe that MIRI would spend more money effectively.
If MIRI would want to hire someone like Terence Tao for a million dollars per year they likely couldn’t simply do that out of their normal budget. To do this they would need to convince donors to give them additional money for that purpose.
If there would be a general sense that this would be the way forward in MIRI and MIRI could express that to donors, I would expect they would get the donor money for it.
They would need to compete with lots of other projects working on AI Alignment.
But yes, I fundamentally agree: if there was a project that convincingly had a >1% chance of solving AI alignment it seems very likely it would be able to raise ~1M/year (maybe even ~10?)
I don’t think that’s the case. I think that if OpenPhil would believe that there’s more room for funding in promising AI alignment research they would spend more money on it than they currently do.
I think the main reason that they aren’t giving MIRI more money than they are giving, is that they don’t believe that MIRI would spend more money effectively.