[Question] What did AI Safety’s specific funding of AGI R&D labs lead to?

Funding I found after some googling:

  • Tallinn’s (and Musk’s) seed investments in DeepMind¹

  • OpenPhil’s $30M grant to OpenAI²

  • FTX’s $500M³, Tallinn’s, Moskovitz’(and Schmidt’s)⁴ investments in Anthropic

I’m curious how you consider the consequences of this support (regardless of original intentions).

What would have happened if this funding had not been offered (at that start-up stage), considering some counterfactual business-as-usual scenarios?

Indirect support was offered as well by leaders active in the AI Safety community:

  • 80K’s job recommendations

  • AISC’s research training

  • Fathom Radiant’s supercomputer

  • FLI’s 2015 conference (which Musk attended, afterward co-founding OpenAI)

  • MIRI’s singularity summit (that enabled Hassabis and Legg to pitch their biggest investor, Thiel, for DeepMind)

  • FHI public intellectuals taking positions at DeepMind

  • MIRI moving the Overton window over AGI

On one hand, I’m curious if you have specific thoughts on what indirect support may have led to. On the other hand, it’s easy there to get vague and speculative.

So how about we focus on verified grants first?

What are your current thoughts? Any past observations that could ground our thinking?

Links:

  1. wired.co.uk/​article/​deepmind

  2. openphilanthropy.org/​grants/​openai-general-support/​

  3. bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2023-06-27/​bankman-fried-s-ftx-said-to-halt-sale-of-its-stake-in-ai-startup-anthropic

  4. crunchbase.com/​funding_round/​anthropic-series-a--61db4cbd

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