I’m sorry to hear that CAIP is in the situation, and this is not at all my area of expertise/I don’t know much about CAIP specifically, so I do not feel qualified to judge this myself.
That said, I will note on the meta level that there is major adverse selection when funding an org in a bad situation that all other major funders have passed on funding, and I would be personally quite hesitant to fund CAIP here without thinking hard about it or getting more info.
Funders typically have more context and private info than me, and with prominent orgs like this there’s typically a reason, but funders are strongly disincentived from making the criticism public. In this case, one of the stated reasons CAIP quotes is “had heard from third parties that CAIP was not a valuable funding opportunity” can be a very good reason if the third party is trustworthy and well informed, and often critics would prefer to be anonymous. I would love to hear more about the exact context here, and why CAIP believes they are making a mistake that readers should ignore, to assuage fears of adverse selection
I generally only recommend donating this when you are:
Confident the opportunity is low downside (which seems false in the context of political advocacy)
If you have a decent idea of why those funders declined that you disagree with
Or you think sufficiently little of all mentioned funders (Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, Macroscopic Ventures, Long-Term Future Fund, Manifund, MIRI, Scott Alexander, and JueYan Zhang) that you don’t update much
You feel you have enough context to make an informed judgement yourself, and grant makers are not meaningfully more well informed than you
I’m skeptical that the reason is really just that it’s politically difficult for most funders to fund political advocacy. It’s harder, but there’s a fair amount of risk tolerant private donors, at least. If it were, I expect they would be back channelling to other less constrained funders that CAIP is a good opportunity, or possibly making public that they did not have an important reason to decline/think the org does good work (as Eli Rose did for Lightcone). I would love for any to reply to my comment saying this is all paranoia! There are other advocacy orgs that are not in as dire a situation.
I think this makes sense, but it seems kind of disconnected from the presentation, which seemed to indicate CAIP proposes reasonable policy and has a strong team. Perhaps Jason can clarify why he thinks major donors have passed on this opportunity.
I wish I could! Unfortunately, despite having several conversations and emails with the various AI safety donors, I’m still confused about why they are declining to fund CAIP. The message I’ve been getting is that other funding opportunities seem more valuable to them, but I don’t know exactly what criteria or measurement system they’re using.
At least one major donor said that they were trying to measure counterfactual impact—something like, try to figure out how much good the laws you’re championing would accomplish if they passed, and then ask how close they got to passing. However, I don’t understand why this analysis disfavors CAIP. Compared to most other organizations in the space, the laws we’re working on are less likely to pass, but would do much more good if they did pass.
Another possible factor is that my co-founder, Thomas Larsen, left CAIP in the spring of 2024, less than a year after starting the organization. As I understand it, Thomas left because he learned that political change is harder than he had initially thought, and because he felt frustrated that CAIP was not powerful enough to accomplish its mission within the short time that he expects we have left before superintelligence is deployed, and because he did not see a good fit between the skills he wanted to use (research, longform writing, forecasting) and CAIP’s day-to-day needs.
Thomas’s early departure is obviously an important piece of information that weighs against donating to CAIP, but given the context, I don’t think it’s reasonable for institutional donors to treat it as decisive. I actually agree with Thomas’s point that CAIP’s mission is very ambitious relative to our resources and that we most likely will not succeed. However, I think it’s worth trying anyway, because the stakes are so high that even a small chance of success is very valuable.
If you’re right, I think that would point to xrisk space funders trusting individuals way too much and institutions way too little. Thomas is a great guy but one guy losing belief in his work (which happens all the time mostly for private reasons, and mostly independent of the actual meaning of the work) should never be a reason to defund an otherwise functioning org, doing seemingly crucial work.
If the alternative theory is correct and the hit pieces are to blame, that still seems like an incorrect decision. When you’re lobbying for something important you can expect some pushback, that shouldn’t be a reason to pull out immediately.
Very well said! I think your first paragraph sums up the most important parts of the story of why CAIP was defunded—Thomas lost interest, mostly for private reasons, and the x-risk funders relied far too heavily on this data point. In part this is because the x-risk funders appear to lack any kind of formal grantmaking criteria, as I write about in post 7 of this sequence.
I do not feel qualified to judge the effectiveness of an advocacy org from the outside—there’s a lot of critical information like whether they’re offending people, if they’re having an impact, whether they’re sucking up oxygen from other orgs in the space, if their policy proposals are realistic, if they’re making good strategic decisions, etc, that I don’t really have the information to evaluate. So it’s hard to engage deeply with an org’s case for itself, and I default to this kind of high level prior. Like, the funders can also see this strong case and still aren’t funding it, so I think my argument stands
I think these are great criteria, Neel. If one or more of the funders had come to me and said, “Hey, here are some people who you’ve offended, or here are some people who say you’re sucking up their oxygen, or here’s why your policy proposals are unrealistic,” then I probably would have just accepted their judgment and trusted that the money is better spent elsewhere. Part of why I’m on the forum discussing these issues is that so far, nobody has offered me any details like that; essentially all I have is their bottom-line assessment that CAIP is less valuable than other funding opportunities.
I think we agree. Thinking out loud: Perhaps the community should consider a way to have a more transparent way of making these decisions. If we collectively decide to follow large funders, but are unable to understand their motives, it is impossible to have fund diversification.
I’m sorry to hear that CAIP is in the situation, and this is not at all my area of expertise/I don’t know much about CAIP specifically, so I do not feel qualified to judge this myself.
That said, I will note on the meta level that there is major adverse selection when funding an org in a bad situation that all other major funders have passed on funding, and I would be personally quite hesitant to fund CAIP here without thinking hard about it or getting more info.
Funders typically have more context and private info than me, and with prominent orgs like this there’s typically a reason, but funders are strongly disincentived from making the criticism public. In this case, one of the stated reasons CAIP quotes is “had heard from third parties that CAIP was not a valuable funding opportunity” can be a very good reason if the third party is trustworthy and well informed, and often critics would prefer to be anonymous. I would love to hear more about the exact context here, and why CAIP believes they are making a mistake that readers should ignore, to assuage fears of adverse selection
I generally only recommend donating this when you are:
Confident the opportunity is low downside (which seems false in the context of political advocacy)
If you have a decent idea of why those funders declined that you disagree with
Or you think sufficiently little of all mentioned funders (Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, Macroscopic Ventures, Long-Term Future Fund, Manifund, MIRI, Scott Alexander, and JueYan Zhang) that you don’t update much
You feel you have enough context to make an informed judgement yourself, and grant makers are not meaningfully more well informed than you
I’m skeptical that the reason is really just that it’s politically difficult for most funders to fund political advocacy. It’s harder, but there’s a fair amount of risk tolerant private donors, at least. If it were, I expect they would be back channelling to other less constrained funders that CAIP is a good opportunity, or possibly making public that they did not have an important reason to decline/think the org does good work (as Eli Rose did for Lightcone). I would love for any to reply to my comment saying this is all paranoia! There are other advocacy orgs that are not in as dire a situation.
I think this makes sense, but it seems kind of disconnected from the presentation, which seemed to indicate CAIP proposes reasonable policy and has a strong team. Perhaps Jason can clarify why he thinks major donors have passed on this opportunity.
I wish I could! Unfortunately, despite having several conversations and emails with the various AI safety donors, I’m still confused about why they are declining to fund CAIP. The message I’ve been getting is that other funding opportunities seem more valuable to them, but I don’t know exactly what criteria or measurement system they’re using.
At least one major donor said that they were trying to measure counterfactual impact—something like, try to figure out how much good the laws you’re championing would accomplish if they passed, and then ask how close they got to passing. However, I don’t understand why this analysis disfavors CAIP. Compared to most other organizations in the space, the laws we’re working on are less likely to pass, but would do much more good if they did pass.
Another possible factor is that my co-founder, Thomas Larsen, left CAIP in the spring of 2024, less than a year after starting the organization. As I understand it, Thomas left because he learned that political change is harder than he had initially thought, and because he felt frustrated that CAIP was not powerful enough to accomplish its mission within the short time that he expects we have left before superintelligence is deployed, and because he did not see a good fit between the skills he wanted to use (research, longform writing, forecasting) and CAIP’s day-to-day needs.
Thomas’s early departure is obviously an important piece of information that weighs against donating to CAIP, but given the context, I don’t think it’s reasonable for institutional donors to treat it as decisive. I actually agree with Thomas’s point that CAIP’s mission is very ambitious relative to our resources and that we most likely will not succeed. However, I think it’s worth trying anyway, because the stakes are so high that even a small chance of success is very valuable.
If I were to bet on what’s happened here, I’d bet it’s something to do with Thomas leaving.
Looking at his LinkedIn and his Forum history, he seems very well connected in the field of AI safety.
I suspect it was easy to get funding because people knew and trusted him.
If you’re right, I think that would point to xrisk space funders trusting individuals way too much and institutions way too little. Thomas is a great guy but one guy losing belief in his work (which happens all the time mostly for private reasons, and mostly independent of the actual meaning of the work) should never be a reason to defund an otherwise functioning org, doing seemingly crucial work.
If the alternative theory is correct and the hit pieces are to blame, that still seems like an incorrect decision. When you’re lobbying for something important you can expect some pushback, that shouldn’t be a reason to pull out immediately.
I agree!
Very well said! I think your first paragraph sums up the most important parts of the story of why CAIP was defunded—Thomas lost interest, mostly for private reasons, and the x-risk funders relied far too heavily on this data point. In part this is because the x-risk funders appear to lack any kind of formal grantmaking criteria, as I write about in post 7 of this sequence.
I do not feel qualified to judge the effectiveness of an advocacy org from the outside—there’s a lot of critical information like whether they’re offending people, if they’re having an impact, whether they’re sucking up oxygen from other orgs in the space, if their policy proposals are realistic, if they’re making good strategic decisions, etc, that I don’t really have the information to evaluate. So it’s hard to engage deeply with an org’s case for itself, and I default to this kind of high level prior. Like, the funders can also see this strong case and still aren’t funding it, so I think my argument stands
I think these are great criteria, Neel. If one or more of the funders had come to me and said, “Hey, here are some people who you’ve offended, or here are some people who say you’re sucking up their oxygen, or here’s why your policy proposals are unrealistic,” then I probably would have just accepted their judgment and trusted that the money is better spent elsewhere. Part of why I’m on the forum discussing these issues is that so far, nobody has offered me any details like that; essentially all I have is their bottom-line assessment that CAIP is less valuable than other funding opportunities.
I think we agree. Thinking out loud: Perhaps the community should consider a way to have a more transparent way of making these decisions. If we collectively decide to follow large funders, but are unable to understand their motives, it is impossible to have fund diversification.