The technical folks leading our AI alignment grantmaking (Daniel Dewey and Catherine Olsson) left to do more “direct” work elsewhere a while back, and Ajeya only switched from a research focus (e.g. the Bio Anchors report) to an alignment grantmaking focus late last year. She did some private recruiting early this year, which resulted in Max Nadeau joining her team very recently, but she’d like to hire more. So the answer to “Why now?” on alignment grantmaking is “Ajeya started hiring soon after she switched into a grantmaking role. Before that, our initial alignment grantmakers left, and it’s been hard to find technical folks who want to focus on grantmaking rather than on more thoroughly technical work.”
Re: the governance team. I’ve lead AI governance grantmaking at Open Phil since ~2019, but for a few years we felt very unclear about what our strategy should be, and our strategic priorities shifted rapidly, and it felt risky to hire new people into a role that might go away through no fault of their own as our strategy shifted. In retrospect, this was a mistake and I wish we’d started to grow the team at least as early as 2021. By 2022 I was finally forced into a situation of “Well, even if it’s risky to take people on, there is just an insane amount of stuff to do and I don’t have time for ~any of it, so I need to hire.” Then I did a couple non-public hiring rounds which resulted in recent new hires Alex Lawsen, Trevor Levin, and Julian Hazell. But we still need to hire more; all of us are already overbooked and turning down opportunities for lack of bandwidth constantly.
The technical folks leading our AI alignment grantmaking (Daniel Dewey and Catherine Olsson) left to do more “direct” work elsewhere a while back, and Ajeya only switched from a research focus (e.g. the Bio Anchors report) to an alignment grantmaking focus late last year. She did some private recruiting early this year, which resulted in Max Nadeau joining her team very recently, but she’d like to hire more. So the answer to “Why now?” on alignment grantmaking is “Ajeya started hiring soon after she switched into a grantmaking role. Before that, our initial alignment grantmakers left, and it’s been hard to find technical folks who want to focus on grantmaking rather than on more thoroughly technical work.”
Re: the governance team. I’ve lead AI governance grantmaking at Open Phil since ~2019, but for a few years we felt very unclear about what our strategy should be, and our strategic priorities shifted rapidly, and it felt risky to hire new people into a role that might go away through no fault of their own as our strategy shifted. In retrospect, this was a mistake and I wish we’d started to grow the team at least as early as 2021. By 2022 I was finally forced into a situation of “Well, even if it’s risky to take people on, there is just an insane amount of stuff to do and I don’t have time for ~any of it, so I need to hire.” Then I did a couple non-public hiring rounds which resulted in recent new hires Alex Lawsen, Trevor Levin, and Julian Hazell. But we still need to hire more; all of us are already overbooked and turning down opportunities for lack of bandwidth constantly.