Pre-Announcing the 2023 Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest

[Update 3: The winners have been selected and notified and will be publicly announced no later than the end of September.]

[Update 2: The contest has now officially launched! See here for the announcement.]

[Update: Work posted after September 23 2022 (and before whatever deadline we establish) will be eligible for the prizes. If you are sitting on great research, there’s no need to delay posting until the formal contest announcement in 2023.]

At Open Philanthropy we believe that future developments in AI could be extremely important, but the timing, pathways, and implications of those developments are uncertain. We want to continually test our arguments about AI and work to surface new considerations that could inform our thinking.

We were pleased when the Future Fund announced a competition earlier this year to challenge their fundamental assumptions about AI. We believe this sort of openness to criticism is good for the AI, longtermist, and EA communities. Given recent developments, it seems likely that competition is no longer moving forward.

We recognize that many people have already invested significant time and thought into their contest entries. We don’t want that effort to be wasted, and we want to incentivize further work in the same vein. For these reasons, Open Phil will run its own AI Worldviews Contest in early 2023.

To be clear, this is a new contest, not a continuation of the Future Fund competition. There will be substantial differences, including:

  • A smaller overall prize pool

  • A different panel of judges

  • Changes to the operationalization of winning entries

The spirit and purpose of the two competitions, however, remains the same. We expect it will be easy to adapt Future Fund submissions for the Open Phil contest.

More details will be published when we formally announce the competition in early 2023. We are releasing this post now to try to alleviate some of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the old Future Fund competition and also to capture some of the value that has already been generated by the Future Fund competition before it dissipates.

We are still figuring out the logistics of the competition, and as such we are not yet in a position to answer many concrete questions (e.g., about deadlines or prize amounts). Nonetheless, if you have questions about the contest you think we might be able to answer, you can leave them as comments below, and we will do our best to answer them over the next few weeks.