My thoughts:

1. It's totally possible to have someone who does a mix of net-positive and net-harmful work, and for it to be good to fund them to do more of the net-positive work
   • In general, one might reasonably be suspicious that grants could subsidize their harmful work, or that working on harmful things could indicate poor taste which might mean they won't do a good job with the helpful stuff
     • This is more an issue if you can't tell whether they did the work you wanted, and if you have no enforcement mechanism to ensure they do
       • Benchmarks seem unusually far in the direction of "you can tell if people did a good job"
   • OTOH in principle funding them to work on positive things might end up pulling attention from the negative things
2. However ... I think the ontology of "advancing capabilities" is too crude to be useful here
   • I think that some types of capabilities work are among the most in-expectation positive things people could be doing, and others are among the most negative
   • It's hard to tell from these descriptions where their work falls
3. In any case, this makes me primarily want to evaluate how good it would be to have these benchmarks
   • Mostly benchmarks seem like they could be helpful in orienting the world to what's happening
     • i.e. I buy the top-level story for impact has something to it
   • Benchmarks could be harmful, via giving something for people to aim towards, and thereby accelerating research
     • I think this may be increasingly a concern as we get close to major impacts
     • But prima facie I'd expect this to be substituting for other comparably-good benchmarks for that purpose, whereas it is more just a new thing that wouldn't exist otherwise for helping people to orient
   • My gut take is mildly-sceptical it's a good grant: like if you got great benchmarks from these grants, I'd be happy; but I sort of suspect that most things that look like this turn into something kind of underwhelming, and after accounting for that I wonder if it's worthwhile
     • I can imagine having my mind changed on this point pretty easily
     • I do think there's something healthy about saying "Activity X is one the world should be doing and isn't; we're just going to fund the most serious attempts we can find to do X, and let the chips fall where they may"

Any idea if these capabilities were made public or, for example, only used for private METR evals?

Funding 2 incredible academics to do work that might make AI Safety things more legible and attractive to work on in academia sounds great. At 1.5m, probably not cost effective it there is only 1 new person counterfactually doing AIS 1 year from now, almost certainly cost effective if there are 10.