Iâm currently writing a post on monetary valuations of various things in EA. Core questions like âhow much is all EA labor worthâ are tricky to answer, because you need to value things in terms of the marginal (last) dollar, but we donât have any concrete plans to spend FTX or OpenPhilâs last dollar.
In this particular case, impact is heavy-tailed so it also depends exactly how ambitious/âtalented the person is. That said, Iâd rather have an aligned median Google quality software engineer working on AI safety than $1M/âyear in the FTX Future Fundâs pocket, but Iâd rather they have $10M/âyear than the engineer. This is based on the median of a couple of extremely uncertain Fermi estimates which need to be cleaned up before posting. Great engineers are often worth more than $10M/âyear on the right project.
There are a few people who Iâd rather have than $100M/âyear: either people who directly generate >100M/âyear of funding (like Sam Bankman-Fried), or are nearly irreplaceable in their field. These definitely include some founders, the very best engineers and AI alignment researchers, and likely various people in biosecurity and policy too.
Note that this doesnât mean we should fund a project that recruits engineers for $1M/âyear! There are often hidden costs to such policies.
Just wanted to nudge that I would find this write up very valuable. Even if the ranges are very wide, I often want to reference some sort of monetary estimate of the value of labor, and having a post like this to reference would be quite useful.
Iâm currently writing a post on monetary valuations of various things in EA. Core questions like âhow much is all EA labor worthâ are tricky to answer, because you need to value things in terms of the marginal (last) dollar, but we donât have any concrete plans to spend FTX or OpenPhilâs last dollar.
In this particular case, impact is heavy-tailed so it also depends exactly how ambitious/âtalented the person is. That said, Iâd rather have an aligned median Google quality software engineer working on AI safety than $1M/âyear in the FTX Future Fundâs pocket, but Iâd rather they have $10M/âyear than the engineer. This is based on the median of a couple of extremely uncertain Fermi estimates which need to be cleaned up before posting. Great engineers are often worth more than $10M/âyear on the right project.
There are a few people who Iâd rather have than $100M/âyear: either people who directly generate >100M/âyear of funding (like Sam Bankman-Fried), or are nearly irreplaceable in their field. These definitely include some founders, the very best engineers and AI alignment researchers, and likely various people in biosecurity and policy too.
Note that this doesnât mean we should fund a project that recruits engineers for $1M/âyear! There are often hidden costs to such policies.
Just wanted to nudge that I would find this write up very valuable. Even if the ranges are very wide, I often want to reference some sort of monetary estimate of the value of labor, and having a post like this to reference would be quite useful.