Robert Miles

The Long-Term Future Fund provided a grant of $121,575 to Robert Miles, administered through his fiscal sponsor, Ashgro Inc. The grant includes a $71,000 stipend for Rob and $50,000 for contractors and other expenses to support his work in producing YouTube videos, appearing on podcasts, helping researchers communicate their work, growing an online community to help newcomers get more involved, and building a large online FAQ at aisafety.info.

This grant continues the support we've given Rob in the past; we were his first significant funder and have been consistently happy with his progress. We believe Rob's historical impact with his outreach projects has been surprisingly large. His videos are of very high quality, with high overall production value and message fidelity. My understanding is that many technical researchers report satisfaction with the way their ideas are presented. Additionally, his videos are popular, with a typical Rob Miles video garnering between 100,000 and 200,000 views. While this is significantly lower than top technical YouTube channels, it has gained more traction than almost any other technical AI safety outreach to date.

The grant is also fairly cheap relative to the historical impact. Rob requested a $71,000 stipend, which is substantially lower than both his counterfactual earnings and the pay of other individuals who are competent in both technical AI safety and communications.

However, we think Rob's non-YouTube projects are less successful or impactful than his main YouTube channel. This is hard to definitively assess since much of it is based on private or hard-to-aggregate information, such as Rob privately advising researchers on how to communicate their work. Nonetheless, we (I) think it's unlikely that the non-YouTube work is as valuable as the videos. That said, the primary investigator of the grant believes Rob’s non-YouTube work is still significantly more valuable than our marginal grants and thus worth funding.

Another point against the grant is that Rob's YouTube channel productivity has been rather low, especially recently, with no new videos produced in the last year. However, he recently released a very long and high-quality video that, in addition to being a useful summary about many of the important events in AI (safety) over the last year, also goes into some detail about why he hasn't produced as much content recently.

Creating quality videos on AI safety, and offering communication and media support to AI safety orgs.

We’ve funded Rob Miles in the past, and since Rob’s work has continued to find traction and maintain a high quality bar, I am viewing this mostly as a grant renewal. Back then, I gave the following rationale for the grant:

The videos on [Rob's] YouTube channel pick up an average of ~20k views. His videos on the official Computerphile channel often pick up more than 100k views, including for topics like logical uncertainty and corrigibility (incidentally, a term Rob came up with).

More things that make me optimistic about Rob’s broad approach:

• He explains that AI alignment is a technical problem. AI safety is not primarily a moral or political position; the biggest chunk of the problem is a matter of computer science. Reaching out to a technical audience to explain that AI safety is a technical problem, and thus directly related to their profession, is a type of ‘outreach’ that I’m very happy to endorse.
• He does not make AI safety a politicized matter. I am very happy that Rob is not needlessly tribalising his content, e.g. by talking about something like “good vs bad ML researchers”. He seems to simply portray it as a set of interesting and important technical problems in the development of AGI.
• His goal is to create interest in these problems from future researchers, and not to simply get as large of an audience as possible. As such, Rob’s explanations don’t optimize for views at the expense of quality explanation. His videos are clearly designed to be engaging, but his explanations are simple and accurate. Rob often interacts with researchers in the community (at places like DeepMind and MIRI) to discuss which concepts are in need of better explanations. I don’t expect Rob to take unilateral action in this domain.

Rob is the first skilled person in the X-risk community working full-time on producing video content. Being the very best we have in this skill area, he is able to help the community in a number of novel ways (for example, he’s already helping existing organizations produce videos about their ideas).

Since then, the average views on his videos appear to have quintupled, usually eclipsing 100k views on YouTube. While I have a lot of uncertainty about what level of engagement those views represent, it would not surprise me if more than 15% of people introduced to the topic of AI alignment in the last year discovered it through Rob’s YouTube channel. This would be a substantial figure, and I also consider Rob’s material one of the best ways to be introduced to the topic (in terms of accurately conveying what the field is about).

In most worlds where I think this grant turns out to be bad, it is because it is currently harmful for the field of AI alignment to grow rapidly, because it might cause the field to become harder to coordinate, cause more bad ideas to become popular, or lead too many people to join who don’t have sufficient background or talent to make strong contributions. I think it is relatively unlikely that we are in that world, and I continue to think that the type of outreach Rob is doing is quite valuable, but I still think there’s at least a 5% probability to it being bad for the AI Alignment field to grow right now.

I trust Rob to think about these considerations and to be careful about how he introduces people to the field; thus, I expect that if we were to end up in a world where this kind of outreach is more harmful than useful, Rob would take appropriate action.

Producing video content on AI alignment

From the application:

My goals are:

• To communicate to intelligent and technically-minded young people that AI Safety:
• To help others in the field communicate and advocate better, by providing high quality, approachable explanations of AIS concepts that people can share, instead of explaining the ideas themselves, or sharing technical documents that people won’t read
• To motivate myself to read and internalise the papers and textbooks, and become a technical AIS researcher in future

My thoughts and reasoning

I think video is a valuable medium for explaining a variety of different concepts (for the best examples of this, see 3Blue1Brown, CGP Grey, and Khan Academy). While there are a lot of people working directly on improving the long term future by writing explanatory content, Rob is the only person I know who has invested significantly in getting better at producing video content. I think this opens a unique set of opportunities for him.

The videos on his Youtube channel pick up an average of ~20k views. His videos on the official Computerphile channel often pick up more than 100k views, including for topics like logical uncertainty and corrigibility (incidentally, a term Rob came up with).

More things that make me optimistic about Rob’s broad approach:

• He explains that AI alignment is a technical problem. AI safety is not primarily a moral or political position; the biggest chunk of the problem is a matter of computer science. Reaching out to a technical audience to explain that AI safety is a technical problem, and thus directly related to their profession, is a type of ‘outreach’ that I’m very happy to endorse.
• He does not make AI safety a politicized matter. I am very happy that Rob is not needlessly tribalising his content, e.g. by talking about something like “good vs bad ML researchers”. He seems to simply portray it as a set of interesting and important technical problems in the development of AGI.
• His goal is to create interest in these problems from future researchers, and not to simply get as large of an audience as possible. As such, Rob’s explanations don’t optimize for views at the expense of quality explanation. His videos are clearly designed to be engaging, but his explanations are simple and accurate. Rob often interacts with researchers in the community (at places like DeepMind and MIRI) to discuss which concepts are in need of better explanations. I don’t expect Rob to take unilateral action in this domain.

Rob is the first skilled person in the X-risk community working full-time on producing video content. Being the very best we have in this skill area, he is able to help the community in a number of novel ways (for example, he’s already helping existing organizations produce videos about their ideas).

Rob made a grant request during the last round, in which he explicitly requested funding for a collaboration with RAISE to produce videos for them. I currently don’t think that working with RAISE is the best use of Rob’s talent, and I’m skeptical of the product RAISE is currently trying to develop. I think it’s a better idea for Rob to focus his efforts on producing his own videos and supporting other organizations with his skills, though this grant doesn’t restrict him to working with any particular organization and I want him to feel free to continue working on RAISE if that is the project he thinks is currently most valuable.

Overall, Rob is developing a new and valuable skill within the X-risk community, and executing on it in a very competent and thoughtful way, making me pretty confident that this grant is a good idea.