For what it’s worth, I find some of what’s said in this thread quite surprising.
Reading your post, I saw you describing two dynamics:
Principles-first EA initiatives are being replaced by AI safety initiatives
AI safety initiatives founded by EAs, which one would naively expect to remain x-risk focused, are becoming safety-washed (e.g., your BlueDot example)
I understood @Ozzie’s first comment on funding to be about 1. But then your subsequent discussion with Ozzie seems to also point to funding as explaining 2.[1]
While Open Phil has opinions within AI safety that have alienated some EAs—e.g., heavy emphasis on pure ML work[2]—my impression was that they are very much motivated by ‘real,’ x-risk-focused AI safety concerns, rather than things like discrimination and copyright infringement. But it sounds like you might actually think that OP-funded AI safety orgs are feeling pressure from OP to be less about x-risk? If so, this is a major update for me, and one that fills me with pessimism.
For example, you say, “[OP-funded orgs] bow to incentives to be the very-most-shining star by OP’s standard, so they can scale up and get more funding. I would just make the trade off the other way: be smaller and more focused on things that matter.”
I think OP and grantees are synced up on xrisk (or at least GCRs) being the terminal goal. My issue is that their instrumental goals seem to involve a lot of deemphasizing that focus to expand reach/influence/status/number of allies in ways that I worry lend themselves to mission/value drift.
The BlueDot example seems different to what I was pointing at.
I would flag that lack of EA funding power sometimes makes xrisk less of an issue.
Like, some groups might not trust that OP/SFF will continue to support them, and then do whatever they think they need to in order to attract other money—and this often is at odds with xrisk prioritization.
(I clearly see this as a issue with the broader world, not with OP/SFF)
For what it’s worth, I find some of what’s said in this thread quite surprising.
Reading your post, I saw you describing two dynamics:
Principles-first EA initiatives are being replaced by AI safety initiatives
AI safety initiatives founded by EAs, which one would naively expect to remain x-risk focused, are becoming safety-washed (e.g., your BlueDot example)
I understood @Ozzie’s first comment on funding to be about 1. But then your subsequent discussion with Ozzie seems to also point to funding as explaining 2.[1]
While Open Phil has opinions within AI safety that have alienated some EAs—e.g., heavy emphasis on pure ML work[2]—my impression was that they are very much motivated by ‘real,’ x-risk-focused AI safety concerns, rather than things like discrimination and copyright infringement. But it sounds like you might actually think that OP-funded AI safety orgs are feeling pressure from OP to be less about x-risk? If so, this is a major update for me, and one that fills me with pessimism.
For example, you say, “[OP-funded orgs] bow to incentives to be the very-most-shining star by OP’s standard, so they can scale up and get more funding. I would just make the trade off the other way: be smaller and more focused on things that matter.”
At the expense of, e.g., more philosophical approaches
I think OP and grantees are synced up on xrisk (or at least GCRs) being the terminal goal. My issue is that their instrumental goals seem to involve a lot of deemphasizing that focus to expand reach/influence/status/number of allies in ways that I worry lend themselves to mission/value drift.
Yea, I broadly agree with Mjreard here.
The BlueDot example seems different to what I was pointing at.
I would flag that lack of EA funding power sometimes makes xrisk less of an issue.
Like, some groups might not trust that OP/SFF will continue to support them, and then do whatever they think they need to in order to attract other money—and this often is at odds with xrisk prioritization.
(I clearly see this as a issue with the broader world, not with OP/SFF)