(Crossposted to the Effective Altruism Forum)

Introduction

In effective altruism, people talk about the room for more funding (RFMF) of various organizations. RFMF is simply the maximum amount of money which can be donated to an organization, and be put to good use, right now. In most cases, “right now” typically refers to the next (fiscal) year.  Most of the time when I see the phrase invoked, it’s to talk about individual charities, for example, one of Givewell’s top-recommended charities. If a charity has run out of room for more funding, it may be typical for effective donors to seek the next best option to donate to.
Last year, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) made the first of its grants from the pool of money it’s received as donations from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project (Open Phil). Since then, I've heard a few people speculating about how much RFMF the whole AI safety community has in general. I don't think that's a sensible question to ask before we have a sense of what the 'AI safety' field is. Before, people were commenting on only the RFMF of individual charities, and now they’re commenting of entire fields as though they’re well-defined. AI safety hasn’t necessarily reached peak RFMF just because MIRI has a runway for one more year to operate at their current capacity, or because FLI made a limited number of grants this year.

Overview of Current Funding For Some Projects

The starting point I used to think about this issue came from Topher Hallquist, from his post explaining his 2015 donations:

I’m feeling pretty cautious right now about donating to organizations focused on existential risk, especially after Elon Musk’s $10 million donation to the Future of Life Institute. Musk’s donation don’t necessarily mean there’s no room for more funding, but it certainly does mean that room for more funding is harder to find than it used to be. Furthermore, it’s difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of efforts in this space, so I think there’s a strong case for waiting to see what comes of this infusion of cash before committing more money.

My friend Andrew and I were discussing this last week. In past years, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) has raised about $1 million (USD) in funds, and received more than that  for their annual operations last year. Going into 2016, Nate Soares, Executive Director of MIRI, wrote the following:

Our successful summer fundraiser has helped determine how ambitious we’re making our plans; although we may still slow down or accelerate our growth based on our fundraising performance, our current plans assume a budget of roughly $1,825,000 per year [emphasis not added].

This seems sensible to me as it's not too much more than what they raised last year, and it seems more and not less money will be flowing into AI safety in the near future. However, Nate also had plans for how MIRI could've productively spent up to $6 million last year, to grow the organization. So, far from MIRI believing it had all the funding it could use, it was seeking more. Of course, others might argue MIRI or other AI safety organizations already receive enough funding relative to other priorities, but that is an argument for a different time.

Andrew and I also talked about how, had FLI had enough funding to grant money to all the promising applicants for its 2015 grants in AI safety research, that would have been millions more flowing into AI safety. It’s true what Topher wrote: that, being outside of FLI, and not otherwise being a major donor, it may be exceedingly difficult for individuals to evaluate funding gaps in AI safety. While FLI has only received $11 million to grant in 2015-16 ($6 million already granted in 2015, with $5 million more to be granted in the coming year), they could easily have granted more than twice that much, had they received the money.

The Big Picture
Above are the funding summaries for several organizations listed in Andrew Critch’s 2015 map of the existential risk reduction ecosystem.There are organizations working on existential risks other than those from AI, but they aren’t explicitly organized in a network the same way AI safety organizations are. So, in practice, the ‘x-risk ecosystem’ is mapable almost exclusively in terms of AI safety.

It seems to me the 'AI safety field', if defined just as the organizations and projects listed in Dr. Critch’s ecosystem map, and perhaps others closely related (e.g., AI Impacts), could have productively absorbed between $10 million and $25 million in 2016 alone. Of course, there are caveats rendering this a conservative estimate. First of all, the above is a contrived version of the AI safety "field", as there is plenty of research outside of this network popping up all the time. Second, I think the organizations and projects I listed above could've themselves thought of more uses for funding. Seeing as they're working on what is (presumably) the most important problem in the world, there is much millions more could do for foundational research on the AGI containment/control problem, safety research into narrow systems aside.

Too Much Variance in Estimates for RFMF in AI Safety

I've also heard people setting the benchmark for truly appropriate funding for AI safety to be in the ballpark of a trillion dollars. While in theory that may be true, on its face it currently seems absurd. I'm not saying there won't be a time in even the next several years when $1 trillion/year couldn't be used effectively. I'm saying that if there isn't a roadmap for how to increase the productive use of ~$10 million/year to AI safety, to $100 million to $1 billion dollars, talking about $1 trillion/year isn't practical. I don't even think there will be more than $1 billion on the table per year for the near future.

This argument can be used to justify continued earning to give on the part of effective altruists. That is, there is so much money, e.g., MIRI could use, it makes sense for everyone who isn't an AI researcher to earn to give. This might make sense if governments and universities give major funding to what they think is AI safety, give 99% of it to only robotic unemployment or something, miss the boat on the control problem, and MIRI gets a pittance of the money that will flow into the field. The idea that there is effectively something like a multi-trillion dollar ceiling for effective funding for AI safety is still unsound.

When the range for RFMF for AI safety ranges between $5-10 million (the amount of funding AI safety received in 2015) and $1 trillion, I feel like anyone not already well-within the AI safety community cannot reasonably make an estimate of how much money the field can productively use in one year.
On the other hand, there are also people who think that AI safety doesn’t need to be a big priority, or is currently as big a priority as it needs to be, so money spent funding AI safety research and strategy would be better spent elsewhere.

All this stated, I myself don’t have a precise estimate of how much capacity for funding the whole AI safety field will have in, say, 2017.

Reasonable Assumptions Going Forward

What I'm confident saying right now is:

1. The amount of money AI safety could've productively used in 2016 alone is within an order of magnitude of $10 million, and probably less than $25 million, based on what I currently know.
2. The amount of total funding available will likely increase year over year for the next several years. There could be quite dramatic rises.. The Open Philanthropy Project, worth $10+ billion (USD), recently announced AI safety will be their top priority next year, although this may not necessarily translate into more major grants in the next 12 months. The White House recently announced they’ll be hosting workshops on the Future of Artificial Intelligence, including concerns over risk. Also, to quote Stuart Russell (HT Luke Muehlhauser): "Industry [has probably invested] more in the last 5 years than governments have invested since the beginning of the field [in the 1950s]." This includes companies like Facebook, Baidu, and Google each investing tons of money into AI research, including Google’s purchase of DeepMind for $500 million in 2014. With an increasing number of universities and corporations investing money and talent into AI research, including AI safety, and now with major philanthropic foundations and governments paying attention to AI safety as well, it seems plausible the amount of funding for AI safety worldwide might balloon up to $100+ million in 2017 or 2018. However, this could just as easily not happen, and there's much uncertainty in projecting this.
3. The field of AI safety will also grow year over year for the next several years. I doubt projects needing funding will grow as fast as the amount of funding available. This is because the rate at which institutions are willing to invest in growth will not only depend on how much money they're receiving now, but how much they can expect to receive in the future. Since how much those expectations reasonably vary is so uncertain, organizations are smartly conservative to hold their cards close to their chest. While OpenAI has pledged $1 billion for funding AI research in general, and not just safety, over the next couple decades, nobody knows if such funding will be available to organizations out of Oxford or Berkeley like AI Impacts MIRI, FHI or CFI. However,

• i) increased awareness and concern over AI safety will draw in more researchers.
• ii) the promise or expectation of more money to come may draw in more researchers seeking funding.
• iii) the expanding field and the increased funding available will create a feedback loop in which institutions in AI safety, such as MIRI, make contingency plans to expand faster, if able to or need be.

Why This Matters

I don't mean to use the amount of funding AI safety has received in 2015 or 2016 as an anchor which will bias how much RFMF I think the field has. However, it seems more extreme lower or upper estimates I’ve encountered are baseless, and either vastly underestimate or overestimate how much the field of AI safety can productively grow each year. This is actually important to figure out.

80,000 Hours rates AI safety as perhaps the most important and neglected cause currently prioritized by the effective altruism movement. Consequently, 80,000 Hours recommends how similarly concerned people can work on the issue. Some talented computer scientists who could do best working in AI safety might opt to earn to give in software engineering or data science, if they conclude the bottleneck on AI safety isn’t talent but funding. Alternatively, small but critical organization which requires funding from value-aligned and consistent donors might fall through the cracks if too many people conclude all AI safety work in general is receiving sufficient funding, and chooses to forgo donating to AI safety. Many of us could make individual decisions going either way, but it also seems many of us could end up making the wrong choice. Assessments of these issues will practically inform decisions many of make over the next few years, determining how much of our time and potential we use fruitfully, or waste.

Everything above just lays out how estimating room for more funding in AI safety overall may be harder than anticipated, and to show how high the variance might be. I invite you to contribute to this discussion, as it only just starting. Please use the above info as a starting point to look into this more, or ask questions that will usefully clarify what we’re thinking about. The best fora to start further discussion seem to be the Effective Altruism Forum, LessWrong, or the AI Safety Discussion group on Facebook, where I initiated the conversation leading to this post.

Related: LessWrong as a social catalyst

I primarily used my prior user profile asked questions of Less Wrong. When I had an inkling for a query, but I didn't have a fully formed hypothesis, I wouldn't know how to search for answers to questions on the Internet myself, so I asked them on Less Wrong.

The reception I have received has been mostly positive. Here are some examples:

• I asked for a cost-benefit analysis of deliberately using nicotine for its nootropic effects.

• Back when I was trying to figure out which college major to pursue, I queried Less Wrong about which one was worth my effort. I followed this up with a discussion about whether it was worthwhile for me to personally, and for someone in general, to pursue graduate studies.

Other student users of Less Wrong benefit from the insight of their careered peers:

• A friend of mine was considering pursuing medicine to earn to give. In the same vein as my own discussion, I suggested he pose the question to Less Wrong. He didn't feel like it at first, so I posed the query on his behalf. In a few days, he received feedback which returned the conclusion that pursuing medical school through the avenues he was aiming for wasn't his best option relative to his other considerations. He showed up in the thread, and expressed his gratitude. The entirely of the online rationalist community was willing to respond provided valuable information for an important question. It might have taken him lots of time, attention, and effort to look for the answers to this question by himself.

• My friends, users Peter Hurford and Arkanj3l, have had similar experiences for choosing a career and switching majors, respectively.

In engaging with Less Wrong, with the rest of you, my experience has been that Less Wrong isn't just useful as an archive of blog posts, but is actively useful as a community of people. As weird as it may seem, you can generate positive externalities that improve the lives of others by merely writing a blog post. This extends to responding in the comments section too. Stupid Questions Threads are a great example of this; you can ask questions about your procedural knowledge gaps without fear of reprisal.  People have gotten great responses about getting more value out of conversations, to being more socially successful, to learning and appreciating music as an adult. Less Wrong may be one of few online communities for which even the comments sections are useful, by default.

For the above examples, even though they weren't the most popular discussions ever started, and likely didn't get as much traffic, it's because of the feedback they received that made them more personally valuable to one individual than several others.

At the CFAR workshop I attended, I was taught two relevant skills:

* Value of Information Calculations: formulating a question well, and performing a Fermi estimate, or back-of-the-envelope question, in an attempt to answer it, generates quantified insight you wouldn't have otherwise anticipated.

* Social Comfort Zone Expansion: humans tend to have a greater aversion to trying new things socially than is maximally effective, and one way of viscerally teaching System 1 this lesson is by trial-and-error of taking small risks. Posting on Less Wrong, especially, e.g., in a special thread, is really a low-risk action. The pang of losing karma can feel real, but losing karma really is a valuable signal that one should try again differently. Also, it's not as bad as failing at taking risks in meatspace.

When I've received downvotes for a comment, I interpret that as useful information, try to model what I did wrong, and thank others for correcting my confused thinking. If you're worried about writing something embarrassing, that's understandable, but realize it's a fact about your untested anticipations, not a fact about everyone else using Less Wrong. There are dozens of brilliant people with valuable insights at the ready, reading Less Wrong for fun, and who like helping us answer our own personal questions. Users shminux and Carl Shulman are exemplars of this.

This isn't an issue for all users, but I feel as if not enough users are taking advantage of the personal value they can get by asking more questions. This post is intended to encourage them. User Gunnar Zarnacke suggested that if enough examples of experiences like this were accrued, it could be transformed into some sort of repository of personal value from Less Wrong

[Contains No HPMOR Spoliers]

[http://hpmor.com/notes/119/](http://hpmor.com/notes/119/)

I was at first confused by Eliezer's requests at the end of Ch. 119. I missed his Author's Notes, which his explains his rationale behind them. I thought I would share in case others missed it, especially because readers on LessWrong may have more elite or broader networks to help Eliezer achieve his new goals.

• Eliezer is seeking the possibility of gaining J. K. Rowling's permission to publish HPMoR in some form, and have the profits donated to a U.K. charity. To this end, he wants to contact someone who can put him in touch with either J. K. Rowling, or Daniel Radcliffe.
• If you're attending or supporting Worldcon through 2015-17, and think Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is worthy, please nominate it to win Best Novel for the 2016 Hugo Awards.
• The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is looking to hire at least one new executive, and very competent mathematicians for its research.
• Eliezer is thinking on what fiction to next write. He would re-edit an old script of his if and only if someone contacts with him to make either a movie with high-quality special effects, or an anime. Otherwise, he is seeking to work with the Collective Intelligence (the problem-solving force composed of the HPMoR readership). Check it out if you consider yourself part of the CI.
• Eliezer is seeking to contact John Paulson the hedge-fund manager, to represent a financier as their angel investor, and other investment opportunities.

Eliezer has several other projects he might be interested in. Learn more by clicking the link.

I've been making rounds on social media with the following message.

Great content on LessWrong isn't as frequent as it used to be, so not as many people read it as frequently. This makes sense. However, I read it at least once every two days for personal interest. So, I'm starting a LessWrong/Rationality Digest, which will be a summary of all posts or comments exceeding 20 upvotes within a week. It will be like a newsletter. Also, it's a good way for those new to LessWrong to learn cool things without having to slog through online cultural baggage. It will never be more than once weekly. If you're curious here is a sample of what the Digest will be like.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e2mHi7W0H2toWPNooSq7QNjEhx_xa0LcLw_NZRfkPPk/edit

Also, major blog posts or articles from related websites, such as Slate Star Codex and Overcoming Bias, or publications from the MIRI, may be included occasionally. If you want on the list send an email to:

lesswrongdigest *at* gmail *dot* com

Users of LessWrong itself have noticed this 'decline' in frequency of quality posts on LessWrong. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as much of the community has migrated to other places, such as Slate Star Codex, or even into meatspace with various organizations, meetups, and the like. In a sense, the rationalist community outgrew LessWrong as a suitable and ultimate nexus. Anyway, I thought you as well would be interested in a LessWrong Digest. If you or your friends:

• find articles in 'Main' are too infrequent, and Discussion only filled with announcements, open threads, and housekeeping posts, to bother checking LessWrong regularly, or,
• are busying themselves with other priorities, and are trying to limit how distracted they are by LessWrong and other media

the LessWrong Digest might work for you, and as a suggestion for your friends. I've fielded suggestions I transform this into a blog, Tumblr, or other format suitable for RSS Feed. Almost everyone is happy with email format right now, but if a few people express an interest in a blog or RSS format, I can make that happen too.