Excellent list! I think these are broadly promising ideas and would love to see people try them out.
I just had an in-person discussion about one of these specifically (4. AI safety communications consultancy), and thought I’d state some reasons why I think that might be less good:
I’m not sure how much demand there would be for a consultancy; unsure whether having AI safety orgs communicate more broadly about their work is useful/good for a vast swath of AI safety orgs (especially TAIS, which I think is trying to produce research for other researchers to adopt).
Comms is an overloaded term and one might say mean “helping TAIS orgs get their research into other researcher’s hands would be good”—this might be reasonable, I don’t know enough about
I tend to think, ala Paul Graham, “big media launch/getting into NYT” type things are generally overrated, in terms of actual impact. (This is a cached heuristic from startup-land; one could argue that AI safety stuff is different)
Insofar as comms matter, I’m not sure a consultancy model is the right fit. I have a prior against working with consultancies in general, vs doing things in-house. Maybe one question is whether comms needs to be a core competency of your org—if so, you should in-house it, and if not, maybe you should just… ignore it?
I’m a much bigger believer in founder-led comms than outsourcing comms
Caveats: I do think of AI safety comms as being quite impactful and think eg the recent 80k video on AI 2027, and the upcoming MIRI book, as being very promising. I’m also excited for more writing, summarizations, analyses (like Zvi or Steve Newman’s, or what Asterisk’s fellowship is aiming for) So perhaps I’m excited for people/orgs that are just focused on doing comms, as opposed to advising others to do comms. And on a meta level I think people should just try doing things—if you were thinking about doing #4, I endorse going for it and ignoring naysayers like me :)
Excellent list! I think these are broadly promising ideas and would love to see people try them out.
I just had an in-person discussion about one of these specifically (4. AI safety communications consultancy), and thought I’d state some reasons why I think that might be less good:
I’m not sure how much demand there would be for a consultancy; unsure whether having AI safety orgs communicate more broadly about their work is useful/good for a vast swath of AI safety orgs (especially TAIS, which I think is trying to produce research for other researchers to adopt).
Comms is an overloaded term and one might say mean “helping TAIS orgs get their research into other researcher’s hands would be good”—this might be reasonable, I don’t know enough about
I tend to think, ala Paul Graham, “big media launch/getting into NYT” type things are generally overrated, in terms of actual impact. (This is a cached heuristic from startup-land; one could argue that AI safety stuff is different)
Insofar as comms matter, I’m not sure a consultancy model is the right fit. I have a prior against working with consultancies in general, vs doing things in-house. Maybe one question is whether comms needs to be a core competency of your org—if so, you should in-house it, and if not, maybe you should just… ignore it?
I’m a much bigger believer in founder-led comms than outsourcing comms
Caveats: I do think of AI safety comms as being quite impactful and think eg the recent 80k video on AI 2027, and the upcoming MIRI book, as being very promising. I’m also excited for more writing, summarizations, analyses (like Zvi or Steve Newman’s, or what Asterisk’s fellowship is aiming for) So perhaps I’m excited for people/orgs that are just focused on doing comms, as opposed to advising others to do comms. And on a meta level I think people should just try doing things—if you were thinking about doing #4, I endorse going for it and ignoring naysayers like me :)