Michaël Rubens Trazzi

@ I want to quickly note that it's a bit unfair for me to specifically only call you out on this or rather, that this is a thing I find with many AI safety projects. It just came up high on Manifund when I logged on for other reasons and saw donations from people I respect.

That said, no, this doesn't exactly assuage my concerns/make me want to donate here. I don't think this work really takes that much time but more importantly, I just don't think it passes the cost-effectiveness bar that I hold my donations and my regrants to given the other opportunities I know of that are out there.

I don't think people doing "non-profit" work should have to make some kind of bare minimum amount to barely cover expenses but I do think that $100k/year to repost short clips on tiktok shows that spending habits in EA have gotten a bit out of control and we should do a bit of a sanity check. I also don't think that the correct metric here is that it's reasonable to pay the equivalent salary of an ML engineer in France. I think people usually/often inflate their earning potential but more importantly, I just don't think it's reasonable for non-profit work to get paid your maximum earning potential.

I think there are two relevant cost-effectiveness factors to consider in grantmaking: raw impact per dollar, and also the reasonable cost to reproduce. I feel uncertain on the former here (and I'm going to be doing a project to address this), but on the latter, I feel pretty confident that I could get 4-5x this impact by having low-cost EAs in 2nd/3rd world countries or college students doing this work.

Based on what you wrote, I think you might feel undercompensated for previous work (on the SB 1047 documentary) and thus want to recoup some of that on this work but I don't think that is what philanthropic funders should do here. Perhaps I'm somewhat open to retroactive funding for the documentary if I/others investigated but I don't think it's good to

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Grow An AI Safety Tiktok Channel To Reach Ten Million People, Aug 2025

@Austin, I also like that he's being responsive. I also think many different POVs can be reasonable. I did not mean for my comments to tell people that they shouldn't in any case donate/give money here. I'm mainly adding my take here. My only point is that money is limited/has opportunity costs and I was mainly explaining why I chose not to.

We can discuss elsewhere on appropriate EA salaries.

@Michael sure, I agree I would need to pay for this warm up period and for them to scale up. I disagree though that this is highly skilled work that couldn't be picked up. I think your average EA who is interested in the topic could do this. I didn't mean my comments to say "you should return this money". Lots of grants/spending in EA ecosystems I consider to be wasteful, ineffective etc. And again, apologies for singling you out on a gripe I have with EA funding.

To cover the minimal costs of the SB 1047 documentary ($15k).