(Unsure how helpful pointing this out is given that CG has probably gotten this critique before, but pointing it out anyways on the off chance it is helpful.)
“The range of AI safety work that CG is willing to fund is pretty broad these days, too.”
On the contrary it seems like your list of examples has a pretty narrow range. Much of it seems to be underpinned by a worldview that is something like “LLMs scale smoothly and predictably to AGI within the frontier labs and within a few years to a decade” (with some aspects of this being more or less load-bearing than others). I get that this view looks quite favorable right now, and I get that it’s hard to find ideas for deploying a large amount of funding under alternatives to this view, but I’d love to see more effort put into seeking out and funding weird alternative research programs and projects that help the field be diversified enough to be robust to some aspects of this worldview being wrong. Even if this view is entirely correct, it still seems to me that these projects are too highly correlated with each other and more decorrelated bets can be made.
Funding Tsvi’s HIA project would be a good start.
If CG in fact agrees with this idea, then signaling this more clearly would be ideal.
(Unsure how helpful pointing this out is given that CG has probably gotten this critique before, but pointing it out anyways on the off chance it is helpful.)
“The range of AI safety work that CG is willing to fund is pretty broad these days, too.”
On the contrary it seems like your list of examples has a pretty narrow range. Much of it seems to be underpinned by a worldview that is something like “LLMs scale smoothly and predictably to AGI within the frontier labs and within a few years to a decade” (with some aspects of this being more or less load-bearing than others). I get that this view looks quite favorable right now, and I get that it’s hard to find ideas for deploying a large amount of funding under alternatives to this view, but I’d love to see more effort put into seeking out and funding weird alternative research programs and projects that help the field be diversified enough to be robust to some aspects of this worldview being wrong. Even if this view is entirely correct, it still seems to me that these projects are too highly correlated with each other and more decorrelated bets can be made.
Funding Tsvi’s HIA project would be a good start.
If CG in fact agrees with this idea, then signaling this more clearly would be ideal.