What progress have you made since your last update?

• Fundraising: We have raised ~130K$ which enables us to run an adjusted version of the incubation program we originally proposed.

• Supporting new AI Safety organizations: We executed on a number of support interventions for young AI safety research organizations. This includes a 1-week product design sprint with a new evals organization and ongoing consultancy sessions with various new AI Safety research org founders. In these sessions we help clients tackle main challenges they face and connect them to potential co-founders, funders or others. We also organized a number of networking events to support these founders (incl. an event with many of the main evals organizations around EAG Bay Area 2024).

• Finding promising founders: We have looked for and found very promising founders to support & received ~130 expressions of interest for our upcoming program. Part of our strategy has been experimenting with AI Safety Entrepreneurship community-building, such as hosting a dinner with this theme around EAG London 2024 (~25 attendants), and hosting a Q&A event with three AI safety org founders (~40 attendants).

• Preparing to launch upcoming programs: We have prepared for launching the upcoming incubation programs (incl. setting up an applicant selection pipeline, headhunting, gathering advisors for incubatees, designing program content, putting together resources) and plan to launch applications this June as soon as we wrap up our current hiring round. The program itself will likely start around August.

If either of our funders would like to hear more details on these activities, people or clients in a de-anonymized manner, we're happy to share this with them directly.

What are your next steps?

• Wrapping up our hiring round & launching our upcoming programs.

Is there anything others could help you with?

• Seed funding circle members: we'd be interested to get in touch with additional people who are interested in providing seed funding for the new AI Safety research organizations (either for- or non-profit). Please let us know if you are interested in this or know someone who might be.

To elaborate on this a bit and make it more precise:
The first 15-20K would go mostly towards runway and very cheap MVPs which don't require resources from us apart from our time (i.e. things we can run online).

Funding above the 15-20K and up to around 60K would go towards somewhat less cheap MVPs such as hosting an in-person mini version of the program for a few individuals who are in the early phases of starting their AI safety research organization.

@RyanKidd thanks for asking!

Receiving the first $5K - 10 K in funding would help us gain very useful runway and resources to put towards better MVPs. We're pretty cheap right now; around $5K gives us 1 extra month of runway.

The resources would enable us to:

1) Continue to fully dedicate our attention to making this program a reality,

2) It would create space for us to execute on more MVPs that are helping us learn how to best shape the program, build a proof of concept, and build our track record in this niche.

In other words, this funding would increase the odds of us being able to run a more comprehensive pilot later in 2024.

The MVPs we are planning and partially already running consist of 1) supporting and coaching very early AI safety research organizations and 2) enabling people to find a cofounder for the AI safety research organization they want to set up.