PauseAI US

PauseAI US was the main place I donated last year. Since then, I’ve become more optimistic that protests are net positive.

Pause protests haven’t had any big visible effects in the last year, which is what I expected, but it’s a weak negative update that the protests haven’t yet gotten traction.

I did not list protests as one of my favorite interventions; in the abstract, I like political advocacy better. But political advocacy is more difficult to evaluate, operates in a more adversarial information environment, and less neglected. There is some hypothetical political advocacy that I like better than protests, but it’s much harder to tell whether the real-life opportunities live up to that hypothetical.

PauseAI US has hired a full-time lobbyist. He’s less experienced than the lobbyists at some other AI safety orgs, but I know that his lobbying efforts straightforwardly focus on x-risk instead of doing some kind of complicated political maneuvering that’s hard for me to evaluate, like what some other orgs do. PauseAI US has had some early successes but it’s hard for me to judge how important they are.

Something that didn’t occur to me last year, but that I now believe matters a lot, is that PauseAI US organizes letter-writing campaigns. In May, PauseAI US organized a campaign to ask Congress members not to impose a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation; they have an ongoing campaign in support of the AI Risk Evaluation Act. According to my recent cost-effectiveness analysis, messaging campaigns look valuable, and right now nobody else is doing it. It could be that these campaigns are the most important function of PauseAI US.

All of the orgs on my 501(c)(3) list deserve more funding. (I suspect the same is true of the 501(c)(4)s, but I’m not confident.) My favorite 501(c)(3) donation target is PauseAI US because:

• Someone should be organizing protests. The only US-based orgs doing that are PauseAI US and Stop AI, and I have some concerns about Stop AI that I discussed last year and above.
• Someone should be running messaging campaigns to support good legislation and oppose bad legislation. Only PauseAI US is doing that.
• PauseAI US is small and doesn’t get much funding, and in particular doesn’t get support from any grantmakers.

In other words, PauseAI US is serving some important functions that nobody else is on top of, and I really want them to be able to keep doing that.

My plan is to donate $40,000 to PauseAI US.

@Austin Thanks for clarifying!

Fwiw, without much context on the finances here, I'd be pro not having a 5% fee on smaller donors - my intuition is that it won't raise much money, and the discouragement of a fee would have an outsized effect on reducing donations. While larger donors are more likely to be rational about this kind of thing, and also to be able to judge how much value Manifund is actually adding to the ecosystem.

PauseAI US organizes protests to advocate for pausing AI development.

Unlike PauseAI Global which has no full-time employees, PauseAI US has a small full-time staff who run protests and political lobbying efforts. I like PauseAI US a little better than PauseAI Global because most major AI companies are headquartered in the US, so I expect a US-based org to have more potential for impact.

PauseAI US also does grassroots lobbying (e.g., organizing volunteers to write letters to Congress) and direct lobbying (talking to policy-makers).

Grassroots lobbying makes sense as a neglected intervention. Direct lobbying isn’t quite as neglected but it’s still one of my favorite interventions. PauseAI US only has a single lobbyist right now, Felix De Simone. He’s more junior than the lobbyists at some other policy orgs, but based on what I know of his background, I expect him to do a competent job. PauseAI US is performing well on obvious surface-level metrics like “number of meetings with Congressional offices per person per month”.

#2: PauseAI US

I would expect advocacy toward policy-makers to be more impactful than public advocacy if they had similar levels of funding (credence: 60%). But pause protests are extremely neglected, so I believe they’re the most promising strategy on the margin. And PauseAI US is my favorite org doing protests because it operates in the United States and it appears appropriately competent and thoughtful.

Protests are especially unpopular among institutional funders, which makes them more promising for individual donors like me.