Elon Musk donates $10M to the Future of Life Institute to keep AI beneficial

Now we can say that we were into AI risk before it was cool.

If you'd asked me two years ago I would have put today's situation in the most optimistic 10% of outcomes. It's nice to be wrong in that direction :)

Is it excellent news? Ignoring the good that will come from the money, shouldn't the fact that Musk is donating the funds increase our estimate that AI is indeed an existential threat? Imagine you have a condition that a very few people think will probably kill you, but most think is harmless. Then a really smart doctor examines you, says you should be worried, and pays for part of your treatment. Although this doctor has helped you, he has also lowered your estimate of how long you are going to live.

Yep. Check out the MIRI top donors list to put the amount in perspective.

The survey indicates that LW has nontrivial experience with academia: 7% of LW has a PhD and 9.9% do academic computer science. I wonder if it'd be useful to create an "awarding effective grants" repository type thread on LW, to pool thoughts on how grant money can be promoted and awarded to effectively achieve research goals. For example, my understanding is that there is a skill called "grantwriting" that is not the same as research ability that makes it easier to be awarded grants; I assume one would want to control for grantwriting ability if one wanted to hand out grants with maximum effectiveness. I don't have much practical experience with academia though... maybe someone who does could frame the problem better and go ahead and create the thread? (Or alternatively tell me why this thread is a bad idea. For example, maybe grantwriting skill consists mostly of knowing what the institutions that typically hand out grants like to see, and FLI is an atypical institution.)

An example of the kind of question we could discuss in such a thread: would it be a good idea for grant proposals to be posted for public commentary on FLI's website, to help them better evaluate grants and spur idea sharing on AI risk reduction in general?

Edit: Here's the thread I created.

An FLI person would be best placed to answer. However, I believe the proposal came from Max Tegmark and/or his team, and I fully support it as an excellent way of making progress on AI safety.

(i) All of the above organisations are now in a position to develop specific relevant research plans, and apply to get them funded - rather than it going to one organisation over another. (ii) Given the number of "non-risk" AI researchers at the conference, and many more signing the letter, this is a wonderful opportunity to follow up with that by encouraging them to get involved with safety research and apply. This seems like something that really needs to happen at this stage.

There will be a lot more excellent project submitted for this than the funding will cover, and this will be a great way to demonstrate that there are a lot of tractable problems, and immediately undertake-able work to be done in this area - this should hopefully both attract more AI researchers to the field, and additional funders who see how timely and worthy of funding this work is.

Consider it seed funding for the whole field of AI safety!

Sean (CSER)

My guesses: he chose to donate to FLI because their star-studded advisory board makes them a good public face of the AI safety movement. Yes, they are a relatively young organization, but it looks like they did a good job putting the research priorities letter together (I'm counting 3685 signatures, which is quite impressive... does anyone know how they promoted it?) Also, since they will only be distributing grants, not spending the money themselves, organizational track record is a bit less important. (And they may rely heavily on folks from MIRI/FHI/etc. to figure out how to award the money anyway.) The money will be distributed as grants because grant money is the main thing that motivates researchers, and Musk wants to change the priorities of the AI research community in general, not just add a few new AI safety researchers on the margin. And holding a competition for grants means you can gather more proposals from a wider variety of people. (In particular, people who currently hold prestigious academic jobs and don't want to leave them for a fledgling new institute.)

Upvoted for phaticness

Yes. The link with guidelines, grant portal, should be on FLI website within the coming week or so.

Using this picture http://futureoflife.org/images/conference150104.jpg as evidence I imagine they will (and should).

This will depend on how many other funders are "swayed" towards the area by this funding and the research that starts coming out of it. This is a great bit of progress, but alone is nowhere near the amount needed to make optimal progress on AI. It's important people don't get the impression that this funding has "solved" the AI problem (I know you're not saying this yourself).

Consider that Xrisk research in e.g. biology draws usefully on technical and domain-specific work in biosafety and biosecurity being done more widely. Until now AI safety research hasn't had that body to draw on in the same way, and has instead focused on fundamental issues on the development of general AI, as well as outlining the challenges that will be faced. Given that much of this funding will go towards technical work by AI researchers, this will hopefully get this side of things going in a big way, and help build a body of support and involvement from the non-risk AI/CS community, which is essential at this moment in time.

But there's a tremendous amount of work that will need to be done - and funded - in both the technical, fundamental, and broader (policy, etc) areas. Even if FHI/CSER are successful in applying, the funds that are likely to be allocated to the work we're doing from this pot is not going to be near what we would need for our respective AI research programmes (I can't speak for MIRI, but I presume this to be the case also). But it will certainly help!

GiveWell is on the case, and has said it is looking at bio threats (as well as nukes, solar storms, interruptions of agriculture). See their blog post on global catastrophic risks potential focus areas.

The open letter is an indication that GiveWell should take AI risk more seriously, while the Musk donation is an indication that near-term room for more funding will be lower. That could go either way.

On the room for more funding question, it's worth noting that GiveWell and Good Ventures are now moving tens of millions of dollars per year, and have been talking about moving quite a bit more than Musk's donation to the areas the Open Philanthropy Project winds up prioritizing.

However, even if the amount of money does not exhaust the field, there may be limits on how fast it can be digested, and the efficient growth path, that would favor gradually increasing activity.

Damn those time travelers, always forgetting the current date. >.>

It was a typo on the FLI website, which has now been corrected to January.

I'm sure I cut and paste the date from the FLI announcement, so I can only assume that mistake was present there at one point!

My only problem with moving this to main is that fewer people check main (and not promoting it would be worst of all) as often. But I could see a case that after a week it could be moved there as it would be a big piece of news that could stay at the top for a while.