Hi Craig! I think you brought up some really good points re: what this piece covers vs doesn't. I wrote this piece with mainly MCPs who have some number of the following problems in mind: 

• don't have connections in the space,
• unsure how to do the career transition,
• have some amount of interest but not confident enough to quit original job,
• have applied for roles and want to work in the field but haven't gotten accepted anywhere.

The solution I proposed was:

• to headhunt people actively,
• to create workshops to convince those people they should transition,
• to hold their hands and guide them through various resources + do reverse headhunting for them to find the most promising roles.

I understand it was probably confusing for me to have gone from MCPs struggling to get in to a model that, via headhunting, seemed to imply that we should prioritize getting the most talented MCPs to transition in (via e.g. educating them about AI risk). 

To clarify, I included the headhunting aspect because these kinds of programs usually have applications open by default rather than inviting people, but I think it may be worth doing both (e.g. I think versions of Lateral Workshop that are invite-based for mathematicians should exist, but in an ideal world there should also be general versions of Lateral Workshop that run the normal application process). Either that, or the active headhunters running these programs would hopefully have MCPs who are / have struggled to transition in in the past on their radars, so the workshops would serve both types of MCPs -- those trying to transition and those not really having considered it strongly.

I also:

• think that some MCPs who struggle to transition in do so in part because of lack of context,
• or because AI safety orgs are pretty insular and rely a lot on recommendations for hiring,
• or because they may not have been able to devote very much time to the transition,

in which case, I think a workshop like this which also walks through applying for career transition grants would be pretty helpful.

So you’re right that the pipeline doesn’t solve your specific case; remote-friendly roles and compensation are field-level problems that I didn't try to tackle in this post, because I'm honestly not sure how to. What I’d say is the pipeline shrinks the population of blocked MCPs to the more difficult structural cases like yours, which, although not perfect, is progress over the current state of affairs.

Hope that clarifies things -- let me know your thoughts!

Hi Chris, thanks for your comment! Our main disagreement seems to be whether the field doing this kind of proactive headhunting will decrease the quality of the community. 

My take on this is roughly: I don't think commitment selection filters for MCPs disappear because we try to headhunt them; career changes are still a pretty big decision, and there's not really any reason why a highly respected, talented MCP who's headhunted would choose to transition to AI safety if they didn't care about the field or want to contribute. Those we can convince with the workshops will feel more confident about taking the leap with some amount of hand-holding; those who aren't convinced probably won't choose to transition anyway, so no harm done.

Strong upvoted! Great post, definitely agree more people should consider transitioning into grantmaking. Especially since research is so power-law distributed, I think many current technical / governance researchers would have much higher counterfactual impact deploying tens of millions of dollars as opposed to e.g. writing another paper. Downstream of a similar post I wrote, I'm currently working on a project to address the grantmaker bottleneck. Would be keen to connect! Have DM'd.

Also, for any grantmakers reading this, please reach out to me if you're interested in e.g. helping create a BlueDot AI Safety Grantmaking Fundamentals course curriculum or doing mentorship!

Hey! Have you seen https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JjxMWQqHKXbyuuJBZ/we-re-building-grantmaking-ai-public-funding-infrastructure ?

Thank you so much, Jenna! I hadn't seen that, have updated the post to include this information!

Thanks Michael! Will be doing more research into the c3s you listed, as I'm working on compiling a complete set of funding recommendations for a future post -- if you have recs on things to read, would be useful :)

Re: ControlAI, seems that they're currently fundraising, but only accepting gifts of $100k+. Have updated my post to reflect this.

Thanks Oscar!! Yeah searching "policy" was not the most robust methodology lol. Though worth noting, I was mainly focused on identifying c4 bets rather than c3 ones since political activity is far less restricted for c4 orgs. I think all of the orgs you mentioned are still c3s! If you know of any major c4 bets, lmk :)

Hi Michael! Thanks for the comment. Agreed that research vs. advocacy matters more than the c3/c4 distinction; I have a footnote clarifying this, but in retrospect it probably belongs in the body of the post.

That said, I think c3/c4 is a useful shorthand for donors specifically because it maps onto who else will fund this work. c3 advocacy orgs like the ones you mention (MIRI, Palisade, PauseAI, maybe even Lightcone but uncertain / don't know enough about their work beyond Lighthaven lol) can receive funding from private foundations, DAFs, and corporate matching programs (whether or not they do in practice is a different question, and I don't know enough about that to comment, but my sense is that broadly, c3s are way less funding constrained than c4s for structural reasons as c4 lobbying orgs largely can't receive funding from these kinds of sources at all). 

So while the intellectual distinction is research vs. advocacy, I'd say the funding gap is sharpest at the c3/c4 boundary, and that's where an individual donor's marginal dollar is most counterfactually valuable-- other than perhaps donations to PACs/specific politicians.

I'm also uncertain about the relative value of lobbying vs. other forms of advocacy. My intuition is that direct lobbying is underfunded relative to its impact, partly because the structural barriers to funding it are so high, but I'd love to see more analysis on this.

Hi Geoffrey,

Thanks for your comment! I broadly agree that Anthropic money is probably going to go overwhelmingly towards technical AI safety work-shaped things, which is not great given how neglected political advocacy work is already.

I don't agree with every premise (I think ASI alignment research is worth pursuing even if we're uncertain it's solvable), but, similarly to how we should not let CG's priorities define the field, I agree we should not let one company's theory of change become the entire field's theory of change.

The best mitigation, I think, is to fight for every marginal dollar that doesn't go to technical safety research. Right now, the c3 research ecosystem is flush with money while c4 advocacy work is still highly funding-constrained. I've written a follow-up making the case that individual donors should redirect what would have been c3 donations toward c4 lobbying and advocacy organizations instead: stop donating to AI safety research*

Would be curious for your takes on the follow-up!

Thank you so much for your comment! 

1. Regarding clarity on gaps, what sort of work would you envision? Is methodology here something like going through all of CG's accepted vs. rejected grants, and trying to identify patterns in what is/is not funded by institutions more broadly?
   1. I think one major gap here is c4s, have written more on this in a recent piece re: "stop donating to AI safety research"
2. Curious to hear if you have thoughts regarding how we can get more people into AI biosecurity grantmaking specfically, given it's such a new + small/niche field?