I’m a Senior Program Officer at Open Phil, focused on technical AI safety funding. I’m hearing a lot of discussion suggesting funding is very tight right now for AI safety, so I wanted to give my take on the situation.
At a high level: AI safety is a top priority for Open Phil, and we are aiming to grow how much we spend in that area. There are many potential projects we’d be excited to fund, including some potential new AI safety orgs as well as renewals to existing grantees, academic research projects, upskilling grants, and more.
At the same time, it is also not the case that someone who reads this post and tries to start an AI safety org would necessarily have an easy time raising funding from us. This is because:
All of our teams whose work touches on AI (Luke Muehlhauser’s team on AI governance, Claire Zabel’s team on capacity building, and me on technical AI safety) are quite understaffed at the moment. We’ve hired several people recently, but across the board we still don’t have the capacity to evaluate all the plausible AI-related grants, and hiring remains a top priority for us.
And we are extra-understaffed for evaluating technical AI safety proposals in particular. I am the only person who is primarily focused on funding technical research projects (sometimes Claire’s team funds AI safety related grants, primarily upskilling, but a large technical AI safety grant like a new research org would fall to me). I currently have no team members; I expect to have one person joining in October and am aiming to launch a wider hiring round soon, but I think it’ll take me several months to build my team’s capacity up substantially.
I began making grants in November 2022, and spent the first few months full-time evaluating applicants affected by FTX (largely academic PIs as opposed to independent organizations started by members of the EA community). Since then, a large chunk of my time has gone into maintaining and renewing existing grant commitments and evaluating grant opportunities referred to us by existing advisors. I am aiming to reserve remaining bandwidth for thinking through strategic priorities, articulating what research directions seem highest-priority and encouraging researchers to work on them (through conversations and hopefully soon through more public communication), and hiring for my team or otherwise helping Open Phil build evaluation capacity in AI safety (including separately from my team).
As a result, I have deliberately held off on launching open calls for grant applications similar to the ones run by Claire’s team (e.g. this one); before onboarding more people (and developing or strengthening internal processes), I would not have the bandwidth to keep up with the applications.
On top of this, in our experience, providing seed funding to new organizations (particularly organizations started by younger and less experienced founders) often leads to complications that aren’t present in funding academic research or career transition grants. We prefer to think carefully about seeding new organizations, and have a different and higher bar for funding someone to start an org than for funding that same person for other purposes (e.g. career development and transition funding, or PhD and postdoc funding).
I’m very uncertain about how to think about seeding new research organizations and many related program strategy questions. I could certainly imagine developing a different picture upon further reflection — but having low capacity combines poorly with the fact that this is a complex type of grant we are uncertain about on a lot of dimensions. We haven’t had the senior staff bandwidth to develop a clear stance on the strategic or process level about this genre of grant, and that means that we are more hesitant to take on such grant investigations — and if / when we do, it takes up more scarce capacity to think through the considerations in a bespoke way rather than having a clear policy to fall back on.
By the way, Open Philanthropy is actively hiring for roles on Ajeya’s team in order to build capacity to make more TAIS grants! You can learn more and apply here.
I’m very uncertain about how to think about seeding new research organizations and many related program strategy questions.
Could you share these program strategy questions? (Assuming there are more not described in your comment). I think the community is likely to have helpful insights on at least some of them. I personally am interested in independently researching similar questions and it would be great to know what answers be useful for OpenPhil.
(Cross-posted to EA Forum.)
I’m a Senior Program Officer at Open Phil, focused on technical AI safety funding. I’m hearing a lot of discussion suggesting funding is very tight right now for AI safety, so I wanted to give my take on the situation.
At a high level: AI safety is a top priority for Open Phil, and we are aiming to grow how much we spend in that area. There are many potential projects we’d be excited to fund, including some potential new AI safety orgs as well as renewals to existing grantees, academic research projects, upskilling grants, and more.
At the same time, it is also not the case that someone who reads this post and tries to start an AI safety org would necessarily have an easy time raising funding from us. This is because:
All of our teams whose work touches on AI (Luke Muehlhauser’s team on AI governance, Claire Zabel’s team on capacity building, and me on technical AI safety) are quite understaffed at the moment. We’ve hired several people recently, but across the board we still don’t have the capacity to evaluate all the plausible AI-related grants, and hiring remains a top priority for us.
And we are extra-understaffed for evaluating technical AI safety proposals in particular. I am the only person who is primarily focused on funding technical research projects (sometimes Claire’s team funds AI safety related grants, primarily upskilling, but a large technical AI safety grant like a new research org would fall to me). I currently have no team members; I expect to have one person joining in October and am aiming to launch a wider hiring round soon, but I think it’ll take me several months to build my team’s capacity up substantially.
I began making grants in November 2022, and spent the first few months full-time evaluating applicants affected by FTX (largely academic PIs as opposed to independent organizations started by members of the EA community). Since then, a large chunk of my time has gone into maintaining and renewing existing grant commitments and evaluating grant opportunities referred to us by existing advisors. I am aiming to reserve remaining bandwidth for thinking through strategic priorities, articulating what research directions seem highest-priority and encouraging researchers to work on them (through conversations and hopefully soon through more public communication), and hiring for my team or otherwise helping Open Phil build evaluation capacity in AI safety (including separately from my team).
As a result, I have deliberately held off on launching open calls for grant applications similar to the ones run by Claire’s team (e.g. this one); before onboarding more people (and developing or strengthening internal processes), I would not have the bandwidth to keep up with the applications.
On top of this, in our experience, providing seed funding to new organizations (particularly organizations started by younger and less experienced founders) often leads to complications that aren’t present in funding academic research or career transition grants. We prefer to think carefully about seeding new organizations, and have a different and higher bar for funding someone to start an org than for funding that same person for other purposes (e.g. career development and transition funding, or PhD and postdoc funding).
I’m very uncertain about how to think about seeding new research organizations and many related program strategy questions. I could certainly imagine developing a different picture upon further reflection — but having low capacity combines poorly with the fact that this is a complex type of grant we are uncertain about on a lot of dimensions. We haven’t had the senior staff bandwidth to develop a clear stance on the strategic or process level about this genre of grant, and that means that we are more hesitant to take on such grant investigations — and if / when we do, it takes up more scarce capacity to think through the considerations in a bespoke way rather than having a clear policy to fall back on.
By the way, Open Philanthropy is actively hiring for roles on Ajeya’s team in order to build capacity to make more TAIS grants! You can learn more and apply here.
Could you share these program strategy questions? (Assuming there are more not described in your comment). I think the community is likely to have helpful insights on at least some of them. I personally am interested in independently researching similar questions and it would be great to know what answers be useful for OpenPhil.