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I’ll note:

1. When you say “paid”, do you mean full-time? I’ve found that “part-time” people often drop off very quickly. Full-time people would be the domain of 80,000 Hours, so I’d suggest working with them on this.

2. “no place for orgs to surface such needs beyond posting a job” → This is complicated. I think that software consultancy models could be neat, and of course, full-time software engineering jobs do happen. Both are a lot of work. I’m much less excited about volunteer-type arrangements, outside of being used to effectively help filter candidates for later hiring.

I think that a lot of people just really can’t understand or predict what would be useful without working in an EA org or in an EA group/​hub. It took me a while! The obvious advice would be for people who want to really kickstart things, is to first try to work in or right next to an EA org for a year or so; then you’ll have a much better sense.

Both sound to me probably at least somewhat useful! I’m ~agnostic on how likely they are to be very useful, how they compare to other things you could spend your time on, or how best to do them, which is mostly because I haven’t thought much about software development.

I expect some other people in the community (e.g., Ozzie Gooen, Nuno Sempere, JP Addison) would have more thoughts on that. But it might make sense to just spend like 0.5-4 hours on MVPs before asking anyone else, if you already have a clear enough idea in your head.

I can also imagine having a Slack workspace /​ Slack channel in an existing workspace for people in EA who are doing software development or are interested in that could perhaps be useful.

(Sidenote: You may also be interested in posts tagged software engineering and/​or looking into their authors/​commenters.)

Glad to hear that you think this’ll be helpful!

(Btw, your comment also made me realise I should add Training For Good to the database, so I’ve now done so. )

Can you share a public grid view of the Airtable in a way that allows people to filter and/​or sort however they want but then doesn’t make that the filtering/​sorting that everyone else sees? I wasn’t aware of how to do that, which is the sole reason I added the Softr option. I think the set of Airtable views I also link people to is probably indeed better if people are happy with the views (i.e., combos of filters and orders) that I’ve already set up.

Agreed that an all-of-EA version of this would also be useful, and that Airtable would be better for that than Notion, a Forum post, or a Google Sheet. I also expect it’s something that literally anyone reading this could set up in less than a day, by:

• duplicating my database

• manually adding things from Gittins’ and Taymon’s database

• maybe removing anything that was in mine that might be out of scope for them (e.g., if they want to limit the scope to just orgs that are in or “aware of & friendly to” EA, since a database of all orgs that are merely quite relevant to any EA cause area may be too large a scope)

• looking up how to do Airtable stuff whenever stuck (I found the basics fairly easy, more so than expected)

Epoch

We’re a team of researchers investigating and forecasting the development of advanced AI.

Labour for the Long Term

Is Britain prepared for the challenges ahead?
We face significant risks, from climate change to pandemics, to digital transformation and geopolitical tensions. We need social-democratic answers to create a fair and resilient future.

Our vision
A leading role for the UK
Many long-term issues have an important political dimension in which the UK can play a leading role. Building on the work of previous Labour governments, we see a future where the UK can play a larger role in areas such as in reducing international tensions and in becoming a world leader in green technology.

EffiSciences

EffiSciences is a collective of students founded in the Écoles Normales Supérieures (ENS) acting for more involved research in the face of the problems of our world. [translated from French]

Palisade Research

“At Palisade, our mission is to help humanity find the safest possible routes to powerful AI systems aligned with human values. Our current approach is to research offensive AI capabilities to better understand and communicate the threats posed by agentic AI systems.”

Jeffrey Ladish is the Executive Director.

Admond

“Admond is an independent Danish think tank that works to promote the safe and beneficial development of artificial intelligence.”

“Artificial intelligence is going to change Denmark. Our mission is to ensure that this change happens safely and for the benefit of our democracy.”

Senter for Langsiktig Politikk

“A politically independent organisation aimed at creating a better and safer future”

A think tank based in Norway.

Confido Institute

Hi, we are the Confido Institute and we believe in a world where decision makers (even outside the EA-rationalist bubble) can make important decisions with less overconfidence and more awareness of the uncertainties involved. We believe that almost all strategic decision-makers (or their advisors) can understand and use forecasting, quantified uncertainty and public forecasting platforms as valuable resources for making better and more informed decisions.

We design tools, workshops and materials to support this mission. This is the first in a series of multiple EA Forum posts. We will tell you more about our mission and our other projects in future articles.

In this post, we are pleased to announce that we have just released the Confido app, a web-based tool for tracking and sharing probabilistic predictions and estimates. You can use it in strategic decision making when you want a probabilistic estimate on a topic from different stakeholders, in meetings to avoid anchoring, to organize forecasting tournaments, or in calibration workshops and lectures. We offer very high data privacy, so it is used also in government setting. See our demo or request your Confido workspace for free.

The current version of Confido is already used by several organizations, including the Dutch government, several policy think tanks and EA organizations.

Confido is under active development and there is a lot more to come. We’d love to hear your feedback and feature requests. To see news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn or collaborate with us on Discord. We are also looking for funding. [emphasis added]

Epistea

We are announcing a new organization called Epistea. Epistea supports projects in the space of existential security, epistemics, rationality, and effective altruism. Some projects we initiate and run ourselves, and some projects we support by providing infrastructure, know-how, staff, operations, or fiscal sponsorship.

Our current projects are FIXED POINT, Prague Fall Season, and the Epistea Residency Program. We support ACS (Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group), PIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems), and HAAISS (Human Aligned AI Summer School).

Transformative Futures Institute

Led by Ross Gruetzemacher

SaferAI

SaferAI is developing the technology that will allow to audit and mitigate potential harms from general-purpose AI systems such as large language models.

Orthogonal: A new agent foundations alignment organization

Apart Research

A*PART is an independent ML safety research and research facilitation organization working for a future with a benevolent relationship to AI.

We run AISI, the Alignment Hackathons, and an AI safety research update series.

Also the European Network for AI Safety (ENAIS)

TLDR; The European Network for AI Safety is a central point for connecting researchers and community organizers in Europe with opportunities and events happening in their vicinity. Sign up here to become a member of the network, and join our launch event on Wednesday, April 5th from 19:00-20:00 CET!

Riesgos Catastróficos Globales

Our mission is to conduct research and prioritize global catastrophic risks in the Spanish-speaking countries of the world.

There is a growing interest in global catastrophic risk (GCR) research in English-speaking regions, yet this area remains neglected elsewhere. We want to address this deficit by identifying initiatives to enhance the public management of GCR in Spanish-speaking countries. In the short term, we will write reports about the initiatives we consider most promising. [Quote from Introducing the new Riesgos Catastróficos Globales team]

International Center for Future Generations

The International Center for Future Generations is a European think-and-do-tank for improving societal resilience in relation to exponential technologies and existential risks.

As of today, their website lists their priorities as:

• Climate crisis

• Technology [including AI] and democracy

• Biosecurity

Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST), MIT AI Alignment (MAIA), and Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI)

These are three distinct but somewhat overlapping field-building initiatives. More info at Update on Harvard AI Safety Team and MIT AI Alignment and at the things that post links to.

Policy Foundry

an Australian-based organisations dedicated to developing high-quality and detailed policy proposals for the greatest challenges of the 21st century. [source]

The Collective Intelligence Project

We are an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology.

Our goal: To overcome the transformative technology trilemma.

Existing tech governance approaches fall prey to the transformative technology trilemma. They assume significant trade-offs between progress, participation, and safety.

Market-forward builders tend to sacrifice safety for progress; risk-averse technocrats tend to sacrifice participation for safety; participation-centered democrats tend to sacrifice progress for participation.

Collective flourishing requires all three. We need CI R&D so we can simultaneously advance technological capabilities, prevent disproportionate risks, and enable individual and collective self-determination.

Also Cavendish Labs:

Cavendish Labs is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization dedicated to solving the most important and neglected scientific problems of our age.

We’re founding a research community in Cavendish, Vermont that’s focused primarily on AI safety and pandemic prevention, although we’re interested in all avenues of effective research.

projects ● papers ● prizes

Also the Forecasting Research Institute

The Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) is a new organization focused on advancing the science of forecasting for the public good.

[...] our team is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. One is foundational, aimed at filling in the gaps in the science of forecasting that represent critical barriers to some of the most important uses of forecasting—like how to handle low probability events, long-run and unobservable outcomes, or complex topics that cannot be captured in a single forecast. The other prong is translational, focused on adapting forecasting methods to practical purposes: increasing the decision-relevance of questions, using forecasting to map important disagreements, and identifying the contexts in which forecasting will be most useful.

[...] Our core team consists of Phil Tetlock, Michael Page, Josh Rosenberg, Ezra Karger, Tegan McCaslin, and Zachary Jacobs. We also work with various contractors and external collaborators in the forecasting space.

Also School of Thinking

School of Thinking (SoT) is a media startup.

Our purpose is to spread Effective Altruist, longtermist, and rationalist values and ideas as much as possible to the general public by leveraging new media. We aim to reach our goal through the creation of high-quality material posted on an ecosystem of YouTube channels, profiles on social media platforms, podcasts, and SoT’s website.

Our priority is to produce content in English and Italian, but we will cover more languages down the line. We have been funded by the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) and the FTX Future Fund.

Also Research in Effective Altruism and Political Science (REAPS)

Also AFTER (Action Fund for Technology and Emerging Risk)

Also Future Academy (but maybe that’s not an org and instead a project of EA Sweden?).

Also anything in Alignment Org Cheat Sheet that’s not in here. And maybe adding that post’s 1-sentence descriptions to the info this database has on each org listed in that post.

Also fp21 and maybe Humanity Forward.

(Reminder: This is a database of orgs relevant to longtermist/​x-risk work, and includes some orgs that are not part of the longtermist/​x-risk-reduction community, don’t associate with those labels, and/​or don’t focus specifically on those issues.)

Also Alvea and Nucleic Acid Observatory

Also Apollo Fellowship, Atlas Fellowship, Condor Camp, and Pathfinder Successif

Also Apollo Academic Surveys

Also AI Safety Field Building Hub and Center for AI Safety

Also Space Futures Initiative and Center for Space Governance

Also EA Engineers

Also Fund for Alignment Research

Also Institute for Progress

Also Encultured AI

Also Pour Demain

To the best of my knowledge, Samotsvety is a group of forecasters, not an organization (although some of its members have recently launched or will soon launch forecasting-related orgs).

Is that 11 or 2?

(Either way, thanks for letting me know :) )

“If you spot any errors or if you know any relevant info I failed to mention about these orgs, let me know via an EA Forum message or via following this link and then commenting there.”

(The very first link I provide in this post allows changing the filtering & sorting, but not commenting, so you have to instead either send a message or use that other link.)

Thanks for your interest in suggesting extra info /​ correction :)