AI Safety and Governance Fund

The AI Safety and Governance Fund does message testing) on what sorts of AI safety messaging people found compelling. More recently, they created a chatbot that talks about AI x-risk, which they use to feed into their messaging experiments; they also have plans for new activities they could pursue with additional funding.

I liked AI Safety and Governance Fund’s original project, and I donated $10,000 because I expected they could do a lot of message testing for not much money. I’m more uncertain about its new project, or how well message testing can scale. I’m optimistic, but not optimistic enough for the org to be one of my top donation candidates, so I’m not donating more this year.

AI Safety and Governance Fund (which, to my knowledge, is a one-man org run by Mikhail Samin) wants to test and spread messages to reduce AI x-risk—see Manifund proposal. It plans to buy ads to test what sorts of messaging are most effective at communicating the arguments for why AI x-risk matters.

I like this project because:

• Pushing for x-risk-relevant regulation is the most promising sort of intervention right now. But we don’t have much data on what sorts of messaging are most effective. This project intends to give us that data.
• Mikhail Samin, who runs the org, has a good track record of work on AI safety projects (from what I can see).
• Mikhail has reasonable plans for what to do with this information once he gets it. (He shared his plans with me privately and asked me not to publish them.)
• The project has room for more funding, but it shouldn’t take much money to accomplish its goal.
• The project received a speculation grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) and is reasonably likely to get more funding, but (1) it might not; (2) even if it does, I think it’s useful to diversify the funding base; (3) I generally like SFF grants and I don’t mind funging SFF dollars.

#1: AI Safety and Governance Fund

This is my top choice because:

• It could greatly improve the value of future communications efforts.
• It’s cheap, which means it’s cost-effective.

It would drop down the list quickly if it received more funding, but right now it’s #1.