I’ll speak only for myself—I haven’t spoken to everyone else about this. I think Reslab lost momentum for 3 reasons. In descending order of importance:
Uncertainty about the funding environment. We actually heard only positive things from grantmakers. But it still seemed like there might be a significant risk of not receiving funding conditional on (reasonably) successful outcomes. (Also, less confidently, the time delays in grantmaker responses were significant enough to dampen momentum.) In these conditions, it was hard to convince high-opportunity-cost staff + external stakeholders to go full speed ahead.
Not having someone whose main focus was Reslab. Everyone had non-Reslab projects that were more important to them than Reslab.
Reputational damage from FTX. I have the weak sense that advertising to engineering talent outside the EA ecosystem was going to be more difficult after the collapse of FTX.
I’ll speak only for myself—I haven’t spoken to everyone else about this. I think Reslab lost momentum for 3 reasons. In descending order of importance:
Uncertainty about the funding environment. We actually heard only positive things from grantmakers. But it still seemed like there might be a significant risk of not receiving funding conditional on (reasonably) successful outcomes. (Also, less confidently, the time delays in grantmaker responses were significant enough to dampen momentum.) In these conditions, it was hard to convince high-opportunity-cost staff + external stakeholders to go full speed ahead.
Not having someone whose main focus was Reslab. Everyone had non-Reslab projects that were more important to them than Reslab.
Reputational damage from FTX. I have the weak sense that advertising to engineering talent outside the EA ecosystem was going to be more difficult after the collapse of FTX.
Thanks for the clarification!