Without rehashing the moral offsetting debate, I seriously doubt that there are any AI safety funding options that provide as much benefit as the harm of enabling OpenAI. This intuition comes from the fact that Open Phil funds a ton of AI safety work, so your money would only be marginal for AI safety work that falls below their funding bar, combined with my anecdotal (totally could be wrong) view that AI safety projects are more limited by manpower than by money.
This strikes me as remarkably counterintuitive, given the enormous disparity between funding between AI capabilities spending and AI safety spending. I was also under the impression that AI capabilities were not as funding-constrained.
AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think it’s better to frame the impact of a subscription not as “you give OAI $20” but rather “you increase OAI’s (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/(# of subscribers)”.
Without rehashing the moral offsetting debate, I seriously doubt that there are any AI safety funding options that provide as much benefit as the harm of enabling OpenAI. This intuition comes from the fact that Open Phil funds a ton of AI safety work, so your money would only be marginal for AI safety work that falls below their funding bar, combined with my anecdotal (totally could be wrong) view that AI safety projects are more limited by manpower than by money.
This strikes me as remarkably counterintuitive, given the enormous disparity between funding between AI capabilities spending and AI safety spending. I was also under the impression that AI capabilities were not as funding-constrained.
AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think it’s better to frame the impact of a subscription not as “you give OAI $20” but rather “you increase OAI’s (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/(# of subscribers)”.
Fair enough.
I still suspect that you may be underestimating marginal AI Safety funding opportunities.