Shifting the culture of what’s acceptable to talk about (through conferences, funding, talking to the media).
I don’t know if this story is written up anywhere, but a few years ago you may have noticed that AI safety went from being awkward to talk about publicly at all to being the thing that Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Stephen Hawking, etc. were writing op-eds about. As far as I know (based on various private conversations) the main causal factor behind this was the founding of FLI by a group of CFAR alumni, including Max Tegmark, together with a conference they ran in Puerto Rico. It is plausibly the largest obviously visible impact that CFAR has had to date.
I don’t know if this story is written up anywhere, but a few years ago you may have noticed that AI safety went from being awkward to talk about publicly at all to being the thing that Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Stephen Hawking, etc. were writing op-eds about. As far as I know (based on various private conversations) the main causal factor behind this was the founding of FLI by a group of CFAR alumni, including Max Tegmark, together with a conference they ran in Puerto Rico. It is plausibly the largest obviously visible impact that CFAR has had to date.