By "research projects followed by", I was again being vague. I didn't mean there are thousands of people reading each and every publication that comes out from the MIRI, or is even linked to by its website as related to its research. I meant there are people interested in the problem, whether through exposure from LessWrong, the MIRI, the Singularity Summit and similar events, who will return to think of the problem in future years. "Tens of thousands" means "at least twenty thousand", which I doubt is true. The 2014 LessWrong survey had 1506 participants, most of who I'd guess "are aware of the MIRI's ongoing work". As this sample is representative of a larger group of LessWrong users, along with the other sources I mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised if there are couple or few thousand people paying attention to the MIRI or related research in at least a cursory way. If it was actually ten thousand, that might surprise me.