For what it’s worth, my estimate of total current funding gap in the sector of “small and new projects motivated by long-term”, counting only “what has robustly positive EV by my estimate”, is >$1M.
In general, I think the ecosystem suffered from the spread of several over-simplified memes. One of them is “the field is talent constrained”, the other one “now with the OpenPhil money...”.
One way how to think about it* is projecting the space along two axes: “project size” and “risks/establishedness”. Relative abundance of funding in the [“medium to large”, “low risks / established”] sector does not imply much about the funding situation in the [“small”,”not established”] sector, or [“medium size”,”unproven/risky”] sector.
The [“medium to large”, “low risks / established”] sector is often constrained by a mix of structural limits how fast can organizations grow without large negative side-effects, bottlenecks in hiring, and yes, sometimes, by very specific talent needs. Much less by funding.
On the opposite side, the [“small”,”not established”] sector is probably funding constrained, plus constrained by a lack of advisors and similar support, and inadequacies in the trust network structure.
Long Term Future fund moving to fill part of the funding gap seems great news.
(*I have this from analysis how an x-risk funding organization can work by Karl Koch & strategy team at AI Safety Camp 1, non-public)
I basically agree with this. My part of the estimate above (~$1M) of what we would be comfortable distributing was more based on the relatively simple process we used to get the grant requests. I think using this method, and the current structure of this fund, I would be comfortable giving around ~$1M to small projects, but beyond that I think I would prefer to diversify funders further and would prefer other groups to start making grants, or for us to change our structure to allow us to give away more resources.
Smaller organisation also probably have to pay larger relative cost for failed grants’ attempts. Their main talents have to spend significant amount of time on writing grant proposals (or write shorter proposals of lower quality).
For what it’s worth, my estimate of total current funding gap in the sector of “small and new projects motivated by long-term”, counting only “what has robustly positive EV by my estimate”, is >$1M.
In general, I think the ecosystem suffered from the spread of several over-simplified memes. One of them is “the field is talent constrained”, the other one “now with the OpenPhil money...”.
One way how to think about it* is projecting the space along two axes: “project size” and “risks/establishedness”. Relative abundance of funding in the [“medium to large”, “low risks / established”] sector does not imply much about the funding situation in the [“small”,”not established”] sector, or [“medium size”,”unproven/risky”] sector.
The [“medium to large”, “low risks / established”] sector is often constrained by a mix of structural limits how fast can organizations grow without large negative side-effects, bottlenecks in hiring, and yes, sometimes, by very specific talent needs. Much less by funding.
On the opposite side, the [“small”,”not established”] sector is probably funding constrained, plus constrained by a lack of advisors and similar support, and inadequacies in the trust network structure.
Long Term Future fund moving to fill part of the funding gap seems great news.
(*I have this from analysis how an x-risk funding organization can work by Karl Koch & strategy team at AI Safety Camp 1, non-public)
I basically agree with this. My part of the estimate above (~$1M) of what we would be comfortable distributing was more based on the relatively simple process we used to get the grant requests. I think using this method, and the current structure of this fund, I would be comfortable giving around ~$1M to small projects, but beyond that I think I would prefer to diversify funders further and would prefer other groups to start making grants, or for us to change our structure to allow us to give away more resources.
Smaller organisation also probably have to pay larger relative cost for failed grants’ attempts. Their main talents have to spend significant amount of time on writing grant proposals (or write shorter proposals of lower quality).
Good points.
Perhaps funding organizations would like better ways of figuring out the risks of supporting new projects? I think valuable work could be done here.
Justin Shovelain came up with that. (Justin and I were both on the strategy team of AISC 1.)