The Open Philanthropy Project recently bought a seat on the board of the billion-dollar nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI for $30 million. Some people have said that this was surprisingly cheap, because the price in dollars was such a low share of OpenAI's eventual endowment: 3%.
To the contrary, this seat on OpenAI's board is very expensive, not because the nominal price is high, but precisely because it is so low.
If OpenAI hasn’t extracted a meaningful-to-it amount of money, then it follows that it is getting something other than money out of the deal. The obvious thing it is getting is buy-in for OpenAI as an AI safety and capacity venture. In exchange for a board seat, the Open Philanthropy Project is aligning itself socially with OpenAI, by taking the position of a material supporter of the project. The important thing is mutual validation, and a nominal donation just large enough to neg the other AI safety organizations supported by the Open Philanthropy Project is simply a customary part of the ritual.
By my count, the grant is larger than all the Open Philanthropy Project's other AI safety grants combined.
(Cross-posted at my personal blog.)
The grant writeup says that the main benefit of the grant is to buy influence, not to scale up OpenAI. I'm ready to believe OpenAI thinks it can do more with more money. I'm sure MIRI thinks it has uses for more money too (at least freeing up staff time from fundraising). If money's not especially scarce, and AI risk is so important, why not just give MIRI as much as it thinks it can use?
Hmm. I'm reading OPP's grant write up for MIRI from 8/2016 and I think in that context I can see why it seems a little odd. For one thing, they say:
This in particular strikes me as strange because 1) If MIRI's approach can be summarized as "Finding method(s) to ensure guaranteed safe AI and proving them rigorously", then technically speaking, that approach should have nearly unli... (read more)