@Austin I think it went very similarly last time. They started the fundraiser and pointed at all the glowing alumni reviews. People were skeptical because the usual donors wouldn't fund it. Oliver said he didn't like it. People argued in the comments a bunch.

After talking to Linda more about it, my impression is that AISC has kind of had to deal with enormous skepticism from the usual donor orgs from the very first edition. IIRC before the first edition most people told them doing training programs for AI Safety was unnecessary (that wasn't really a thing back then), and I think skepticism stayed high for most camp editions since then to various extents for varying reasons.

I think their actual results throughout this have kept being incredibly good despite what were often (usually? Basically always?) shoestring budgets.

I dunno. Maybe they're just bad at playing the usual fundraising games.

I still want to hear out what Oliver has to say this time, but I feel inclined to just ignore the position of the usual donor ecosystem on this. I think they've been just been wrong in the same direction over and over and over again here.

AISC6 was fantastic for me. Without it, I think it's likely I wouldn't have ended up employed in AI Safety until a year or more later, and plausible I wouldn't have ended up employed in AI Safety at all. The research project I started on at AISC6 continued for two years after that, first under LTFF grants, then at Apollo Research.