Mox

I'm a huge believer in Mox, and I'm excited for more excellent events and more opportunities for fellows.

(COI: I currently live with Austin Chen and Rachel Shu.)

I had been planning to donate $20k-40k to Manifund or Mox out of personal donation budget; alas I think this might lead to too significant COI for my own future possible involvements with Manifund or Mox. Instead, I'm laying out a case for funding here!

Mostly my excitement about Mox routes through (1) great event experiences I've had at Mox and (2) the dumb obvious case for there to exist an AI safety hub in San Francisco.

On (1): I've spoken at a Golden Gate Institute event focused on my METR research, co-hosted a hackathon with/for METR, and co-hosted 2 very large music events.

I'm not sure what the counterfactual for the GGI was because I didn't organize it, but presumably GGI would have used some worse event space (in particular much smaller + with less relevant default crowd).

I think there's a ~50% chance the METR hackathon simply wouldn't have happened without Mox. (In the end I think the hackathon ended up not being so helpful, unfortunately, although this is very clearly on us and not Mox.)

The large music events are my favorite thing in the world. We could put them on elsewhere, but I think they'd be ~50% of the current crowd size (and we probably have room to comfortably 1.5x the current crowd at Mox). I don't want to overstate how helpful these events are for building a community around Mox, but my understanding is that attendees who have made donations to support the event or to support Mox for hosting for the event have this as a pretty primary motivation.

On (2), I basically think the claim below which Mox make above is correct.

In a single year on a shoestring budget, we've become a primary nexus for the AI safety community and other EA-adjacent work in San Francisco.

Now, in some ways I think this reflects a sad state of affairs! It seems to me obvious that the AI safety community should have more presence in SF. In particular, I think Constellation should move to SF. If a Constellation office was set up separate from Mox in SF I expect that, by default, it would become the primary nexus for safety work. Then there's some question of what the comparative advantage of each place would be, and so on. But for now it's clearly true that Mox is the only game in town in SF.

I think the dumb case for some sort of AIS space to exist in SF is obvious -- good work often benefits or emerges from in-person connections, in expensive cities it's helpful to have dedicated in-person space to make this happen; SF is the center of AI work. Now, I think there are some obvious things to enable this vision which I don't see Mox doing much of (e.g. happy hours with staff from major AI companies). But I have enough faith in the basic vision + confidence in the founders to be excited to back Mox for their funding goals.