Founded in 2018, RP is dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. To date, our team has conducted over 50 person-years of work (you can find all our public research here). One of our key strengths is our operational capacity, which allows us to recruit, onboard, and support talented researchers to produce quality work with minimal bureaucratic red tape.
Given our strong operations, RP would like to support other promising EA projects – particularly longtermist ones – in getting off the ground. To this end, we recently launched a new Special Projects Program.
As an off-shoot of our Operations Department, Special Projects is a distinct team dedicated to supporting the launch of new projects rather than running RP’s day-to-day operations.
The team’s Acting Director Carolyn Footitt is leading this work with Associates María De la Lama and Cristina Schmidt Ibáñez. Their projects generally fall under two areas:
Although our involvement will depend on the project, in general, the SP Team will provide operational support to projects much in the way that our Core Operations Team supports RP’s work. Such services might include developing and managing budgets, accounting, contracting, running hiring rounds, planning the onboarding of new staff, hosting and developing the project website, and other operations tasks outlined in the below chart.
The SP Team is currently incubating the following projects:
The SP Team also helped to launch Epoch, a new AI research initiative, which we are continuing to fiscally sponsor.
From late July to early August, Condor Camp held its first retreat with 13 highly talented Brazilian university students. Seminars and workshops focused on how to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, including AI safety, pandemics, biosecurity, global health and poverty, and animal welfare. Following this event, RP’s Associate Researcher Renan Araújo is now:
RP has been helping Epoch to hire for multiple research roles. Supporting the initiative’s operations frees up the researchers’ time so they can focus on their work.
Thus far, the researchers have already done a deep dive into machine learning model size trends in which they identified distinct patterns in vision and language model sizes over time and hypothesized reasons for these patterns.
Through this type of work, Epoch aims to support strategy and forecasting around the development of transformative artificial intelligence–AI that could have an impact as significant as the industrial revolution.
RP is interested in fiscally sponsoring additional projects that are aligned with our mission and values. Currently, we are especially interested in longtermist megaprojects, but this is not a requirement; we are open to hearing about any initiative in the EA space. Some sample projects might include (but are certainly not limited to): civilizational refuges, EA early warning forecasting, and red-teaming initiatives. If in doubt, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Special Projects Team.
The best way to get in touch with us is to submit an Expression of Interest form. This form will be open on an ongoing basis. We are excited to hear from those who are interested in:
This post is a project of Rethink Priorities–a think tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. The author is Rachel Norman. Thanks to Carolyn Footitt for their helpful input. If you are interested in RP’s work, please visit our research database and subscribe to our newsletter.
I'm very excited to see this launch. As someone who is running an EA-aligned organisation myself, I honestly think that assistance with writing a budget could be one of the most impactful ways of helping people get a project off the ground and I would love to see someone start an additional project focusing specifically on this.
If people need help with creating a budget or just want advice, I could potentially help. Feel free to email [email protected]