Ajeya Cotra is currently the only evaluator for technical AIS grants.
This situation seems really bizarre to me. I know they have multiple researchers in-house investigating these issues, like Joseph Carlsmith. I’m really curious what’s going on here.
I know they’ve previously had (what seemed to me) like talented people join and leave that team. The fact that it’s so small now, given the complexity and importance of the topic, is something I have trouble grappling with.
My guess is that there are some key reasons for this that aren’t obvious externally.
I’d assume that it’s really important for this team to become really strong, but would obviously flag that when things are that strange, it’s likely difficult to fix, unless you really understand why the situation is the way it is now. I’d also encourage people to try to help here, but I just want to flag that it might be more difficult than it might initially seem.
Also, I should have flagged that Holden is now the “Director of AI Strategy” there. This seems like a significant prioritization.
It seems like there are several people at OP trying to figure out what to broadly do about AI, but only one person (Ajeya) doing AIS grantmaking? I assume they’ve made some decision, like, “It’s fairly obvious what organizations we should fund right now, our main question is figuring out the big picture.”
I’m curious why this got the disagreement votes. 1. People don’t think Holden doing that is significant prioritization? 2. There aren’t several people at OP trying to broadly figure out what to do about AI? 3. There’s some other strategy OP is following?
This situation seems really bizarre to me. I know they have multiple researchers in-house investigating these issues, like Joseph Carlsmith. I’m really curious what’s going on here.
I know they’ve previously had (what seemed to me) like talented people join and leave that team. The fact that it’s so small now, given the complexity and importance of the topic, is something I have trouble grappling with.
My guess is that there are some key reasons for this that aren’t obvious externally.
I’d assume that it’s really important for this team to become really strong, but would obviously flag that when things are that strange, it’s likely difficult to fix, unless you really understand why the situation is the way it is now. I’d also encourage people to try to help here, but I just want to flag that it might be more difficult than it might initially seem.
Also, I should have flagged that Holden is now the “Director of AI Strategy” there. This seems like a significant prioritization.
It seems like there are several people at OP trying to figure out what to broadly do about AI, but only one person (Ajeya) doing AIS grantmaking? I assume they’ve made some decision, like, “It’s fairly obvious what organizations we should fund right now, our main question is figuring out the big picture.”
I’m curious why this got the disagreement votes.
1. People don’t think Holden doing that is significant prioritization?
2. There aren’t several people at OP trying to broadly figure out what to do about AI?
3. There’s some other strategy OP is following?