Alignment Ecosystem Development

The Long-Term Future Fund provided a $99,330 grant to Alignment Ecosystem Development (AED), an AI safety field-building nonprofit, through their fiscal sponsor, Ashgro Inc. The grant covered a 1-year stipend for 1.25 full-time equivalents (FTEs) to build and maintain digital infrastructure for the AI safety ecosystem, as well as expenses related to AI safety domains and other assorted costs. AED has built, taken ownership of, closely partnered with, and/or maintained approximately 15 different projects, including the AI Safety Map (aisafety.world), AI Safety Info (aisafety.info), and AI Safety Quest (aisafety.quest), with the overarching objective of growing and improving the AI safety ecosystem. Bryce Robertson, a volunteer, currently works on the ecosystem full-time and would like to transition into a paid role. The grant allocated $66,000 for stipends and the remaining funds for various software and other expenses.

Fund managers had differing opinions on whether this grant represented a good use of marginal funds. The primary investigator strongly supported the grant, while two other fund managers who examined it in detail were not convinced that it met the fund's high funding bar. Habryka, one of the fund managers, expressed excitement for the grant primarily because it continued the work that AED leadership had historically done in the AI safety space. Although not particularly enthusiastic about any individual project in the bundle, Habryka had heard of many people benefiting from AED's support in various ways and held a prior belief that good infrastructure work in this space often involves providing a significant amount of illegible and diffuse support. For example, Habryka noted that plex from AED had been quite useful in moderating and assisting with Rob Miles's Discord, which Habryka considered a valuable piece of community infrastructure, contributing positively to the impact of Rob Miles's videos in informing people about AI safety.

Arguments in favor of the grant included the websites being useful pieces of community infrastructure that can help people orient towards AI safety and the historically surprising popularity of AED's work. However, some fund managers raised concerns that AED might be spreading themselves too thin by working on many different projects rather than focusing on just one. They also questioned the quality of the outputs and worried that if newcomers' first exposure to AI safety was through AED's work, they might become unimpressed with the field as a result.

In accordance with the fund's procedure, the project was put to a vote, and the grant ultimately passed the funding bar. At a more abstract level, the fund's general policy or heuristic has been to lean towards funding when one fund manager is very excited about a grant, and other fund managers are more neutral. The underlying implicit model here is that individual excitement is more likely to identify grants with the potential for significant impact or "hits" in a hits-based giving framework, compared to grant decisions with consensus decisions where everybody is happy about a grant, but no one is actively thrilled. The underlying philosophy is explicated further in an earlier comment I wrote in January 2021, about a year before I joined LTFF.