Shallow review of AI safety 2024

Project summary

Last year I and a collaborator summarised every live project in AI safety, tried to understand their theories of change, listed outputs, personnel, and funding amounts, and wrote an editorial.

We talked to a couple dozen researchers to check our glosses and get their views. The post was well-received (100 karma on AF, which is very rare) and is e.g. a standard intro resource at 80k. We did it pro bono (or rather, failed to obtain retroactive funding).

We want to update the review for 2024: progress, shutdowns, trends, and our takes.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The original goal was to help new researchers orient and know their options, to help everyone understand where things stand, and to help funders see quickly what has already been funded. Simply putting all links in one place was perhaps half of the value.

This iteration: same as above but incorporating last year's feedback and seeking to get sign-off from more than 50% of those covered. Also a professionalised version suitable for policy audiences.

$8K: bare bones update (80 hours). Skim everything, reuse the taxonomy and seek correction in the comments.

$13K: much more effort on verifying details and seeking out consensus, more editorial and synthesis

$17K: section on academic and outgroup efforts. Add a glossy formal report optimised for policy people.

How will this funding be used?

Wages.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Gavin and Stag did last year's version. Stephen is the source of much of the (limited) descriptive statistics about the field.

We ran this project last year, and it was well-received. Habryka: "I think overall this post did a pretty good job of a lot of different work happening in the field. I don't have a ton more to say, I just think posts like this should come out every few months, and the takes in this one overall seemed pretty good to me."

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

N/A

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

$0 so far.

I think collections like this add significant value to newcomers to the field, mostly by being a list of all areas worth maybe thinking about, and key links (rather than eg by providing a lot of takes on which areas are more or less important, unless the author has excellent taste). Gavin has convinced me that the previous post gets enough traffic for it be valuable to be kept up to date.

I'm not super convinced that a ton has changed since 2023, but enough has to be worth at least some updating, so I'm funding the MVP version (I expect this to have more errors than higher funding, but for these to largely be found in the comments, and even higher funding would still have errors). I'd be fine to see others funding it higher though