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Piotr Zaborszczyk

@Piotr

Ex-programmer interested in AI x-risks mitigation. Experienced in leading small orgs.

$4,900total balance
$0charity balance
$4,900cash balance

$0 in pending offers

About Me

Ambitious serial specialist. Voracious reader of high quality content. Experienced in IT, business, EA & AI safety. My investments pay my salary, so the full amount donated to my project will be spent on the project itself.

Projects

AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)

Comments

AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)
Piotr avatar

Piotr Zaborszczyk

about 1 hour ago

Progress update

What progress have you made since your last update?

I tried recruiting people offline in Warsaw, which worked much much worse than expected. E.g. after 15 hours of in-person meetups in AI spaces, I found literally 0 people interested in joining an AI x-risk group. Even designing and printing informative leaflets didn't help.

I've helped organise a panel discussion about AI safety at the University of Warsaw, in October 2025. Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Michał Kubiak and Jakub Growiec were the panelists selected by me. I also bought food, drinks and advertising posters from my grant money. The event amassed 30 attendees, only one of which ended up an active member of my online communities.

After burning more than half the cash on mostly unsuccessful attempts in Warsaw (I had to rent a small studio to live there, as I'm originally from somewhere else), in late June 2025 I decided to move my field building efforts online. I had much better success there.

After cold-messaging 20k+ people on AI-themed and student-themed Facebook groups, I recruited 160 people that expressed an interest in AI safety, to my Messenger group. Recruiting took 200+ hours. I maintained the discussions about AI, AI safety and AI-related x-risks for 5 months (early July - early December 2025). Maintaining the activity in the group took another 200+ hours.

Realising that Messenger is not really the best place to host the group + that the vast majority of my Messenger community is lazy and interested in mostly lurking or at most exchanging a few messages, starting December 2025 I created a new space - on Discord. As of today, it's a 80-person server that mainly hosts discussions about non-technical AI safety in Polish. I'm maintaining it actively and I intend to recruit more people to it, maybe with the final goal of ~370 people (recruiting can be tiresome & can take up a big amount of time).

Meanwhile, I'm now mostly dedicated to research for my planned book "AI, Superbabies, Paradise Engineering: What We Should Do With Our Future" which will aim at explaining the core ideas of three main thinkers/activists: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen and David Pearce to both professional and lay public.

I've also personally recruited about 50 people into AI Safety Poland's slack. It's the official EA-led and EA-blessed Polish AI safety community, too afraid to discuss x-risks for my taste. They focus mainly on things like explainable AI and avoid talking about x-risk, which I dislike and disagree with. Nevertheless, we're allies, so I help them.

I want to stress that all this wasn't done only on the money from the grant. AFAIK Warsaw is only 2x cheaper than San Francisco and this work wouldn't be possible without my mostly-passive income from renting studio apartments. Nevertheless, the grant enabled me to try bolder approaches, dedicate myself more & buy the tools I needed (e.g. a tablet on which I could work during my vacation, some AI subscriptions, a few months' stay in Warsaw etc.) For that I am grateful. I think that without the grant, the community building work - if it would happen at all - would be severely limited in scope. I estimate that without the grant, I would have done less than half of what I did for community building.

What are your next steps?

Most of the cash is gone now and I believe that I've now discharged my duties towards donors, as I've worked 500+ or possibly 600+ hours inside field building, not counting time spent learning AI safety in order to be a better teacher, leader and mentor to my communities. I do plan to maintain and grow my AI safety Discord channel & I plan to continue helping out the EA org AI Safety Poland. Myself, I'm mostly going to focus on writing a book about AI safety. I'm also interested in working with organisations like CeSIA and Evitable in the future.

Is there anything others could help you with?

When my book is ready (if it does end up being written), I'll need plenty of help to publish & market it well.

AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)
Piotr avatar

Piotr Zaborszczyk

about 1 year ago

@NeelNanda Yes, I think so! ~$5k is good enough for the first semester, but I think I could productively use up to $25k total over the space of 3 semesters. Also, if I had $25k for 3 semesters, I could probably hire some paid part-time help, to help with faster growth (reaching many universities simultaneously etc.)

Obviously, anything between what I have now and $25k total is fine too.

Transactions

ForDateTypeAmount
Manifund Bank10 months agowithdraw5124
AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)about 1 year agoproject donation+1904
AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)about 1 year agoproject donation+3220
AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)about 1 year agoproject donation+4900