Firstly: Nice, glad to have another competent and well-resourced person on-board. Welcome to the effort.
I suggest: Take some time to form reasonably deep models of the landscape, first technical[1] and then the major actors and how they’re interfacing with the challenge.[2] This will inform your strategy going forward. Most people, even people who are full time in AI safety, seem to not have super deep models (so don’t let yourself be socially-memetically tugged by people who don’t have clear models).
Being independently wealthy in this field is awesome, as you’ll be able to work on whatever your inner compass points to as the best, rather than needing to track grantmaker wants and all of the accompanying stress. With that level of income you’d also be able to be one of the top handful of grantmakers in the field if you wanted, the AISafety.com donation guide has a bunch of relevant info (though might need an update sweep, feel free to ping me with questions on this).
Things look pretty bad in many directions, but it’s not over yet and the space of possible actions is vast. Best of skill finding good ones!
I recommend https://agentfoundations.study/, and much of https://www.aisafety.com/stay-informed, and chewing on the ideas until they’re clear enough in your mind that you can easily get them across to almost anyone. This is good practice internally as well as good for the world. The Sequences are also excellent grounding for the type of thinking needed in this field—it’s what they were designed for. Start with the highlights, maybe go on to the rest if it feels valuable. AI Safety Fundamentals courses are also worth taking, but you’ll want a lot of additional reading and thinking on top of that. I’d also be up for a call or two if you like, I’ve been doing the self-fund (+sometimes giving grants) and try and save the world thing for some time now.
Technical first seems best, as it’s the grounding which underpins what would be needed in governance, and will help you orient better than going straight to governance I suspect.
Firstly: Nice, glad to have another competent and well-resourced person on-board. Welcome to the effort.
I suggest: Take some time to form reasonably deep models of the landscape, first technical[1] and then the major actors and how they’re interfacing with the challenge.[2] This will inform your strategy going forward. Most people, even people who are full time in AI safety, seem to not have super deep models (so don’t let yourself be socially-memetically tugged by people who don’t have clear models).
Being independently wealthy in this field is awesome, as you’ll be able to work on whatever your inner compass points to as the best, rather than needing to track grantmaker wants and all of the accompanying stress. With that level of income you’d also be able to be one of the top handful of grantmakers in the field if you wanted, the AISafety.com donation guide has a bunch of relevant info (though might need an update sweep, feel free to ping me with questions on this).
Things look pretty bad in many directions, but it’s not over yet and the space of possible actions is vast. Best of skill finding good ones!
I recommend https://agentfoundations.study/, and much of https://www.aisafety.com/stay-informed, and chewing on the ideas until they’re clear enough in your mind that you can easily get them across to almost anyone. This is good practice internally as well as good for the world. The Sequences are also excellent grounding for the type of thinking needed in this field—it’s what they were designed for. Start with the highlights, maybe go on to the rest if it feels valuable. AI Safety Fundamentals courses are also worth taking, but you’ll want a lot of additional reading and thinking on top of that. I’d also be up for a call or two if you like, I’ve been doing the self-fund (+sometimes giving grants) and try and save the world thing for some time now.
Technical first seems best, as it’s the grounding which underpins what would be needed in governance, and will help you orient better than going straight to governance I suspect.
Currently these two links include the commas so they redirect to 404 pages
Oh, yup, thanks, fixed.