One percent of the world’s AI compute (LLM-grade GPU capacity) is in the UAE which does not have an AI Security Institute. I’ve planned to spend 6-9% of my bandwidth this month (2-3 days during May 2025) on encouraging the UAE to establish an AISI. Today is the first day.
However in my view even the most optimistic impact estimate of the successful execution of that plan doesn’t realistically lead to a greater than 2% shift in the prediction market of the UAE starting an AI Security Institute before 2026. Even if a UAE AISI existed, then it would not be allocated more than 1% to 5% (mode 2%) of the overall national AI budget (roughly $2b). Taking 2% of 2% of $2b is a maximum valuation of $800k for the entire project (I think that the median valuation would be significantly lower, but I’m not using the maximum here to be generous, but because I believe that — for this system — using the max value is more informative for decision making and easier to estimate than evaluating the 95th or 99.9th percentile value).
I was talking about this with my dad earlier, whose take was that attending the 1 day https://govaisummitmea.com/ on May 13th would be less than 0.01% of the work involved in actually pulling this thing off. My understanding of what he meant in more formal terms is that if your goal is for the UAE to have an AISI before 2026, and you then decompose each step of the plan to achieve that outcome into players in a Shapley value calculation, then acquiring these tickets has an average marginal contribution of at most 0.0001 times at most $800k, which is $80. And it would be foolish to pay the cost of one day of my time as well as tickets for me plus a collaborator when the return on that investment is — by this model — capped at $80.
Although my dad’s take here is reasonable given the information available to him, he doesn’t have the full context and the time he can allocate to learning about this project is restricted. Even though he is burdened by the demands of his various responsibilities, I’m grateful that supporting me in particular is one that he has always prioritized. I love Abba!
Here’s why Abba is wrong. There are 400 total seats. The cost is USD 1299 per head, so 2600 to register two attendees. At this price range it makes sense for a company to reimburse the fee to send representatives if it profits from building relationships with UAE policymakers. These will mostly be orgs not working directly on reducing AI x-risk. Although having 0.5% of attendees be alignment researchers is unlikely to affect the overall course of discussions, it is a counterweight which balances against worlds where this minority group has zero participation in these conversations. I think it may be as much as 3.25% of the work needed, which is ten times more than the floor break even point of 0.325% (2600/800k). But besides that, my team has been approved for up to 5 seats, we have a 10-page draft policy memo coauthored with faculty at https://mbrsg.ae/, and we can just ask for the registration fee to be waived. I agree that it would be insane to pay the full amount out of pocket. (Edit: we got the waiver request approved.)
Here’s why Abba is right. This post was written after midnight. Later today I will go to the Middle East and Africa’s largest cybersecurity event, https://gisec.ae/. I look forward to further comments and reviews.
However in my view even the most optimistic impact estimate of the successful execution of that plan doesn’t realistically lead to a greater than 2% shift in the prediction market of the UAE starting an AI Security Institute before 2026.
2 percentage points, or 2%? Where if the current likelihood is, say, 20%, a 2% shift would be 0.4 percentage points.
Caught up with my former classmate Youssef Awad, Head of Engineering at ctf.ae. He offered to introduce me to H.E Al Kuwaiti, UAE’s Head of Cybersecurity.
Ideally you would wish to calibrate your EV calcs against the benefit of a UAE AISI, though, no, not the expected budget? We could estimate the value of such an institute being more than the running cost (or, indeed, less) depending on the relative leverage of such an institute.
One percent of the world’s AI compute (LLM-grade GPU capacity) is in the UAE which does not have an AI Security Institute. I’ve planned to spend 6-9% of my bandwidth this month (2-3 days during May 2025) on encouraging the UAE to establish an AISI. Today is the first day.
However in my view even the most optimistic impact estimate of the successful execution of that plan doesn’t realistically lead to a greater than 2% shift in the prediction market of the UAE starting an AI Security Institute before 2026. Even if a UAE AISI existed, then it would not be allocated more than 1% to 5% (mode 2%) of the overall national AI budget (roughly $2b). Taking 2% of 2% of $2b is a maximum valuation of $800k for the entire project (I think that the median valuation would be significantly lower, but I’m not using the maximum here to be generous, but because I believe that — for this system — using the max value is more informative for decision making and easier to estimate than evaluating the 95th or 99.9th percentile value).
I was talking about this with my dad earlier, whose take was that attending the 1 day https://govaisummitmea.com/ on May 13th would be less than 0.01% of the work involved in actually pulling this thing off. My understanding of what he meant in more formal terms is that if your goal is for the UAE to have an AISI before 2026, and you then decompose each step of the plan to achieve that outcome into players in a Shapley value calculation, then acquiring these tickets has an average marginal contribution of at most 0.0001 times at most $800k, which is $80. And it would be foolish to pay the cost of one day of my time as well as tickets for me plus a collaborator when the return on that investment is — by this model — capped at $80.
Although my dad’s take here is reasonable given the information available to him, he doesn’t have the full context and the time he can allocate to learning about this project is restricted. Even though he is burdened by the demands of his various responsibilities, I’m grateful that supporting me in particular is one that he has always prioritized. I love Abba!
Here’s why Abba is wrong. There are 400 total seats. The cost is USD 1299 per head, so 2600 to register two attendees. At this price range it makes sense for a company to reimburse the fee to send representatives if it profits from building relationships with UAE policymakers. These will mostly be orgs not working directly on reducing AI x-risk. Although having 0.5% of attendees be alignment researchers is unlikely to affect the overall course of discussions, it is a counterweight which balances against worlds where this minority group has zero participation in these conversations. I think it may be as much as 3.25% of the work needed, which is ten times more than the floor break even point of 0.325% (2600/800k). But besides that, my team has been approved for up to 5 seats, we have a 10-page draft policy memo coauthored with faculty at https://mbrsg.ae/, and we can just ask for the registration fee to be waived. I agree that it would be insane to pay the full amount out of pocket. (Edit: we got the waiver request approved.)
Here’s why Abba is right. This post was written after midnight. Later today I will go to the Middle East and Africa’s largest cybersecurity event, https://gisec.ae/. I look forward to further comments and reviews.
2 percentage points, or 2%? Where if the current likelihood is, say, 20%, a 2% shift would be 0.4 percentage points.
2 percentage points.
Well, really it is a function of the current likelihood, but my prior on that has error bars in the log scale.
Main outcome from GISEC:
Caught up with my former classmate Youssef Awad, Head of Engineering at ctf.ae. He offered to introduce me to H.E Al Kuwaiti, UAE’s Head of Cybersecurity.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/youssef-awad_hitbcw2021-hack-in-the-studio-fireside-activity-6886922368669773824--U7A?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAB1XIooBL0Jpa_rZP3bnhFCq43GFhreJv5o
Ideally you would wish to calibrate your EV calcs against the benefit of a UAE AISI, though, no, not the expected budget? We could estimate the value of such an institute being more than the running cost (or, indeed, less) depending on the relative leverage of such an institute.