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Lightcone Commons have completed their first granting round. And the things their granters and recommenders have funded mostly do not meet the current moment (the same is true for SFF’s most recent round, and Coefficient Giving). Let’s hope that their upcoming future rounds do better, or other funders step in. All of our lives are on the line.
(Apologies if this is blunt, but this is important..)
I get that money allocators (grantmakers and VCs alike) typically invest in people over ideas. But this is taking that to the extreme. Yudkowsky and Soares’ funding recommendations don’t fit with their book (which I am a big fan of)! They are funding obscure content creators, researchers and think tanks that are mostly just people in their Bay Area social circles, it seems. Why aren’t they funding orgs directly aimed at getting international agreement to ban RSI and ASI, as per what they say is necessary (and is, in fact, necessary), in chapter 14 of IABIED? I heard that orgs such as Control AI were in their funding orders, but why so low as to not have any real chance of being seriously funded?[1] Soares talks about organisations he’d recommend funding here, but is seemingly unaware that they already exist[2]. The other evaluators’ choices don’t seem any better (but at least some of them have excuses). $813k for Mox, $300k for Vibecamp, and only $75k for PauseIA [France] and $50k for PauseAI UK? (None for PauseAI Global or PauseAI US?) Seriously?
Other good grants: Stop The AI Race ($400k[3]); CeSIA ($765k); Secure AI project ($858k); American Shield ($1M). And on the margin, it’s good that campaign group Encode AI was given $2M, but they don’t even mention extinction risk on their website![4]
We need to be funding orgs that are consistent in warning of extinction risk, and how close we are to it. Most of the funded orgs don’t. Indeed, most mainstream media outlets now mention extinction more than AI Safety org websites!
Ultimately, only law can prevent extinction[5], so w