Daniel Filan

We recommended a grant of $23,544 to pay Daniel Filan for his time making 12 additional episodes of the AI X-risk Research Podcast (AXRP), as well as the costs of hosting, editing, and transcription.

The reasoning behind this grant was similar to the reasoning behind my last grant to AXRP:

• I’ve listened or read through several episodes of the podcast; I thought Daniel asked good questions and got researchers to talk about interesting parts of their work. I think having researchers talk about their work informally can provide value not provided by papers (and to a lesser extent, not provided by blog posts). In particular:
• I’ve personally found that talks by researchers can help me understand their research better than reading their academic papers (e.g. Jared Kaplan’s talk about his scaling laws paper). This effect seems to have also held for at least one listener of Daniel’s podcast.
• Informal conversations can expose motivations for the research and relative confidence level in conclusions better than published work.

Daniel also shared some survey data in his grant application about how people rated AXRP compared to other AI alignment resources, though I didn't look at this closely when making the grant decision, as I already had a reasonably strong prior towards funding.

Technical support for a podcast about research aimed at reducing x-risk from AI.

Recusal note: Adam Gleave and Oliver Habryka did not participate in the voting or final discussion around this grant.

Daniel applied for funding to pay for audio editing, transcription, and recording space usage for his AI alignment podcast, the AI X-risk Research Podcast (AXRP).

I’ve listened or read through several episodes of the podcast; I thought Daniel asked good questions and got researchers to talk about interesting parts of their work. I think having researchers talk about their work informally can provide value not provided by papers (and to a lesser extent, not provided by blog posts). In particular:

• I’ve personally found that talks by researchers can help me understand their research better than reading their academic papers (e.g. Jared Kaplan’s talk about his scaling laws paper). This effect seems to have also held for at least one listener of Daniel’s podcast.
• Informal conversations can expose motivations for the research and relative confidence level in conclusions better than published work.

Daniel provided some statistics about his podcast download numbers over time: 200 – 400 per episode as of early March. This guide suggests that Daniel’s podcast is in the top 10% to 25% of podcasts, though this single metric seems like a pretty dubious measure of podcast performance. (I also think it’s too early to tell exactly how well this podcast will do.)

Overall, the existing download counts along with personal anecdotes from people getting value out of this podcast were enough to justify this grant for me.