Zhonghao He

I've made a $1.75k offer to this project. @RenanAraujo and I asked Zhonghao to put this project up, having agreed to fund him for our "Aurora Scholarship" program. (This was supposed to be $4.8k shared between us, but @Austin pipped us to the first $1.2k! I would advocate raising the maximum grant amount if possible @Austin; Zhonghao noted that he would be working on this project for more hours than we had pre-committed to fund, and @NeelNanda comment strengthens the case for potentially funding the remaining hours.)

**Main points in favor of this grant**

Renan and I put out a call to an invite-only scholarship program, the "Aurora Scholarship," to 9 individuals recommended by a source we trust. We were aiming to support people who are nationals of or have lived in China with a $2,400-$4,800 scholarship for a research project in a topic related to technical AI safety or AI governance. The project should last for approximately 4-8 weeks (i.e. we aim to offer $600/week at 20h/week).

Our hope is that scholars might use the experience and signaling value of these projects to counterfactually advance through to the next stage in their chosen career pipeline (e.g., PhD acceptance, think-tank placement), and that this program will strengthen the Chinese AI safety community. The program is loosely inspired by this CAIS program (but note we're not affiliated with CAIS and this does not mean CAIS endorses this program), especially in the sense that it is a requirement to join the program that each scholar has to seek their own supervisor.

Zhonghao was one of our excellent applicants.

**Donor's main reservations**

I think the project itself is very low downside.

Targeting the Aurora Scholarship invitees in the way we have has greater possible downside. We think this is fairly low, and have taken steps to lower this further (e.g. by not including junior researchers currently located in China).

**Process for deciding amount**

As above.

**Conflicts of interest**

None.

This seems pretty worth funding to me - it's a cheap grant, and I think this would be a cool paper to exist! I don't have a background in neuroscience or cognitive science, and I expect there's some techniques there worth my knowing about that would be useful for my work, but that much of it is irrelevant. I'd love for a paper surveying and summarising the most relevant ideas to exist! I've mentored Wes Gurnee and I trust his judgement/ability to represent the mech interp side, and expect Stephen Casper to also give good takes here. I don't know the rest of the organisers, but Wes vouches for their overall competence. I'd fund this myself if I had a regranting budget.

(I think a Nature publication is very ambitious, and would advise against bothering, but think an Arxiv publication is more than sufficient to make this worthwhile)