The AI Safety Fundamentals opportunities board, filtered for “funding” as the opportunity type, is probably also useful.
MichaelA
Karma: 12,512
Oh wow, thanks for flagging that, fixed! Amazing that a whole extra word in the title itself survived a whole year, and survived me copy-pasting the title in various other places too 😬
Thanks for making this!
What do the asterisks before a given resource mean? (E.g. before “Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t”.) Maybe they mean you’re especially strongly recommending that?
AI Safety Support have a list of funding opportunities. I’m pretty sure all of them are already in this post + comments section, but it’s plausible that’ll change in future.
Yeah, the “About sharing information from this report” section attempts to explain this. Also, for what it’s worth, I approved all access requests, generally within 24 hours.
That said, FYI I’ve now switched to the folder being viewable by anyone with the link, rather than requiring requesting access, though we still have the policies in “About sharing information from this report”. (This switch was partly because my sense of the risks vs benefits has changed, and partly because we apparently hit the max number of people who can be individually shared on a folder.)
Description provided to me by one of the organizers:
This is a public platform for AI safety projects where funders can find you. You shop around for donations from donors that already have a high donor score on the platform, and their donations will signal-boost your project so that more donors and funders will see it.
See also An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation for indications of some additional non-EA funding opportunities relevant to AI safety (e.g. for people doing PhDs or further academic work).
FYI, if any readers want just a list of funding opportunities and to see some that aren’t in here, they could check out List of EA funding opportunities.
(But note that that includes some things not relevant to AI safety, and excludes some funding sources from outside the EA community.)
$20 Million in NSF Grants for Safety Research
After a year of negotiation, the NSF has announced a $20 million request for proposals for empirical AI safety research.
Here is the detailed program description.
The request for proposals is broad, as is common for NSF RfPs. Many safety avenues, such as transparency and anomaly detection, are in scope
Manifund is launching a new regranting program! We will allocate ~$2 million over the next six months based on the recommendations of our regrantors. Grantees can apply for funding through our site; we’re also looking for additional regrantors and donors to join.
Yeah, this seems to me like an important question. I see it as one subquestion of the broader, seemingly important, and seemingly neglected questions “What fraction of importance-adjusted AI safety and governance work will be done or heavily boosted by AIs? What’s needed to enable that? What are the implications of that?”
I previously had a discussion focused on another subquestion of that, which is what the implications are for government funding programs in particular. I wrote notes from that conversation and will copy them below. (Some of this is also relevant to other questions in this vicinity.)
“Key takeaways
Maybe in future most technical AI safety work will be done by AIs.
Maybe that has important implications for whether & how to get government funding for technical AI safety work?
E.g., be less enthusiastic about getting government funding for more human AI safety researchers?
E.g., be more enthusiastic about laying the groundwork for gov funding for AI assistance for top AI safety researchers later?
Such as by more strongly prioritizing having well-scoped research agendas, or ensuring top AI safety researchers (or their orgs) have enough credibility signals to potentially attract major government funding?
This is a subquestion of the broader question “What should we do to prep for a world where most technical AI safety work can be done by AIs?”, which also seems neglected as far as I can tell.
Seems worth someone spending 1-20 hours doing distillation/research/writing on that topic, then sharing that with relevant people.
Additional object-level notes
See [v. A] Introduction & summary – Survey on intermediate goals in AI governance for an indication of how excited AI risk folks are about “Increase US and/or UK government spending on AI reliability, robustness, verification, reward learning, interpretability, and explainability”.
Details of people’s views can be found in [v. B] Ratings & comments on goals related to government spending – Survey on intermediate goals in AI governance
(Feel free to request access, though it may not be granted.)
But there may in future be a huge army of AI safety researchers in the form of AIs, or AI tools/systems that boost AI safety researchers in other ways. What does that imply, esp. for gov funding programs?
Reduced importance of funding for AI safety work, since it’ll be less bottlenecked by labor (which is costly) and more by a handful of good scalable ideas?
Funding for AI safety work is mostly important for getting top AI safety researchers to have huge compute budgets to run (and train?) all those AI assistance, rather than funding people themselves or other things?
Perhaps this even increases the importance of funding, since we thought it’d be hard to scale the relevant labor via people but it may be easier to scale via lots of compute and hence AI assistance?
Increased importance of particular forms of “well-scoped” research agendas/questions? Or more specifically, focusing now on whatever work it’s hardest to hand off to AIs but that best sets things up for using AIs?
Make the best AI safety researchers, research agendas, and orgs more credible/legible to gov people so that they can absorb lots of funding to support AI assistants?
What does that require?
Might mean putting some of the best AI safety researchers in new or existing institutions that look credible? E.g. into academic labs, or merging a few safety projects into one org that we ensure has a great brand?
Start pushing the idea (in EA, to gov people, etc.) that gov should now/soon provide increasingly much funding for AI safety via compute support for relevant people?
Start pushing the idea that gov should be very choosy about who to support but then support them a lot? Like support just a few of the best AI safety researchers/orgs but providing them with a huge compute budget?
That’s unusual and seems hard to make happen. Maybe that makes it worth actively laying groundwork for this?
Research proposal
I think this seems worth a brief investigation of, then explicitly deciding whether or not to spend more time.
Ideally this’d be done by someone with decent AI technical knowledge and/or gov funding program knowledge.
If someone isn’t the ideal fit for working on this but has capacity and interest, they could:
spend 1-10 hours
aim to point out some somewhat-obvious-once-stated hypotheses, without properly vetting them or fleshing them out
Lean somewhat on conversations with relevant people or on sharing a rough doc with relevant people to elicit their thoughts
Maybe the goals of an initial stab at this would be:
Increase the chance that someone who does have strong technical and/or gov knowledge does further thinking on this
Increase the chance that relevant technical AI safety people, leaders of technical AI safety orgs, and/or people in government bear this in mind and adjust their behavior in relevant ways”
RP’s AI Governance & Strategy team—June 2023 interim overview
Thanks!
“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 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.
Rethink Priorities is hiring a Compute Governance Researcher or Research Assistant
Tentative suggestion: Maybe try to find a way include info about how much karma the post has near the start of the episode description, in the podcast feed?
Reasoning:
This could help in deciding what to listen to, at least for the “all audio” feed. (E.g. I definitely don’t have time for even just all AI-related episodes in there.)
It could also led to herd-like behavior or ignoring good content that didn’t get lots of karma right away. But I think that that is outweighed by the above benefit.
OTOH this may just be infeasible to do in a non-misleading way, if you put things in the feed soon enough after they’re posted that the karma hasn’t really stabilized yet* and if it’s hard to automatically update the description to reflect karma scores later.
*My rough sense is that karma scores are pretty stable after something like 3-7 days—stable enough that something like “karma after 5 days was y” is useful info—but that if you can only show karma scores after e.g. 1 day then that wouldn’t be very informative.
Hi Richard, quick reactions without having much context:
If you mean this is all one company, this sounds like putting too many eggs in one basket, and insufficiently exploring.
I think it’s generally good to apply to many different types of roles and organizations.
Sometimes it makes sense to focus in mostly on one role type or one org. But probably not entirely. And not once one has already gotten some evidence that that’s not the right fit. (Receiving a few rejections isn’t much negative info, but if it’s >5 for one particular org or type of thing then that’s probably at least enough evidence that one should also apply to lots of other things and not spend lots of further time on this one thing.)
I’d be much less focused on “am I annoying them?” than “Am I spending too much of my valuable time on this one type of thing, and also potentially missing lots of other better-fitting things elsewhere?”