Description of subprojects and results, including major changes from the original proposal

The post went up roughly on time (29th December) and was fairly well-received (though it garnered less karma than last year). Comments were good and only the Alex Altair entry required notable edits. This is evidence but not strong evidence that the current version is error-free.

Our conference scrape provided some academic work which I think is underappreciated on LW but less than I hoped.

I'm very happy with the new fields (target case and broad approach) and our data entry on them.

Change: Following comments from funders we didn't do the "glossy" PDF version. Surplus money will go towards the 2025 version.

Spending breakdown

100% on salaries for the team. Thanks especially to Shoshannah Tekofsky, a highly graceful research manager.

A donor has sent another $10k, which will partly fund the 2025 edition.

Approving this project! As I wrote for the Manifund blog:

Gavin Leech is a forecaster, researcher and founder of Arb; he’s proposing to re-rerun a 2023 survey of AI Safety. The landscape shifts pretty quickly, so I’d love to see what’s changed since last year.

I'm especially glad to see that others including Ryan, Anton, and Matt of OpenPhil are also excited to fund this.

(I've also updated the funding limit to indicate that Gavin's funding needs have been met)

I work at Open Philanthropy, and I recently let Gavin know that Open Phil is planning to recommend a grant of $5k to Arb for this project (they had already raised ~$10k by the time we came across it).

Like others here, I believe this overview is a valuable reference for the field, especially for newcomers. 

I wanted to flag that this project would have been eligible for our RFP for work that builds capacity to address risks from transformative AI. I worry that not all potential applicants are aware of the RFP or its scope, so I’ll take this opportunity to mention that this RFP’s scope is quite broad, including funding for: 

• Training and mentorship programs

• Events

• Groups

• Resources, media, and communications

• Almost any other type of project that builds capacity for advanced AI risks (in the sense of increasing the number of careers devoted to these problems, supporting people doing this work, and sharing knowledge related to this work). 

More details at the link above. People might also find this page helpful, which lists all currently open application programs at Open Phil. 

Thanks to Austin, whose EA Forum post brought this funding opportunity to our attention.

I appreciate your work summarizing every live project in AI safety and would love to see it thoroughly updated for 2024.

good luck with that

Thanks very much to all donors! A private donor has offered to fill the difference so please stop sending me money (mods, if there's a way to close projects I can't see it). We've started work.

I found last year's review useful.

expressing my support using a signal with nonzero cost

I appreciated the previous iterations of this review. Trying to encourage more of the same

I think collections like this add significant value to newcomers to the field, mostly by being a list of all areas worth maybe thinking about, and key links (rather than eg by providing a lot of takes on which areas are more or less important, unless the author has excellent taste). Gavin has convinced me that the previous post gets enough traffic for it be valuable to be kept up to date.

I'm not super convinced that a ton has changed since 2023, but enough has to be worth at least some updating, so I'm funding the MVP version (I expect this to have more errors than higher funding, but for these to largely be found in the comments, and even higher funding would still have errors). I'd be fine to see others funding it higher though