Consider Joining the UK Foundation Model Taskforce

gw mostly has it right here. If this effort is seen as a failure it will be used as an example by the many opponents of such moves to defeat any future such efforts, and those who spent their political capital to make this version happen will not be in position to fight back. There are very few examples of things like this that are large getting second chances. 

Also this is simply an unusually great opportunity, a lot of things have already gone right that we would have expected to go wrong. A second effort even if it happened would likely end up fake.

As someone who is definitely not a political expert (and not from or super familiar with the UK), my guess would be that you just can't muster up enough political capital or will to try again. Taxpayer money (in the US at least) seems highly scrutinized, you typically can't just fail with a lot of money and have no one say anything about it. 

So then if the first try does fail, then it requires more political capital to push for allocating a bunch of money again, and failing again looks really bad for anyone who led or supported that effort. Politicians seem to care about career risk, and all this makes the risk associated with a second shot higher than the first.

I'd agree that this makes a second shot unlikely (including from other governments, if it fails spectacularly enough), if circumstances stay about the same. But circumstances will probably change, so IMO we might eventually get more such taskforces, just not soon. 

From Zvi's linked Google form in the post:

We want to find people with diverse skills and backgrounds to work in or with the Taskforce, to catalytically advance AI safety this year with a global impact. We're particularly interested in building out "safety infrastructure" and developing risk assessments that can inform policymakers and spur global coordination on AI safety. For example, this would include experience running evals for LLMs, experience with model pretraining, finetuning, or RL, and experience in technical research in the societal impacts of models. But we're open to hearing what should be done beyond this as well.

They mostly want people who are already skilled up and can hit the ground running, is my understanding, although it is always good to have options. The long term matters but the short term is necessary to get to the long term.