I like the idea. Like Austin, I am "unsure if Mikolaj appreciates the scope of what he's trying to take on," but I wanted to modestly signal support for the effort.

Quick thoughts:

• I agree with Ryan that public impact analysis for AI safety orgs would be good (or at least, I would want to skim more of them); I'm very unsure if Mikolaj is well-placed to do that, since it seems like the kind of analysis that would benefit a lot from either technical AI safety expertise, grantmaking experience, and/or insider knowledge of the TAIS landscape. I'm also unsure if Mikolaj appreciates the scope of what he's trying to take on.

  • That said, I think the cost of Mikolaj trying to create one is pretty low, and generally encourage people trying to do things! I'm making a small donation to encourage this.

  • I would be more excited if somebody else with a known track record (like Nuno or Larks) was helping with this project; though on the flip side the overhead costs of collaboration are real so idk if this is actually a good idea

• I also don't know if cost-effectiveness is a particularly good metric for TAIS. Research fields don't typically use this kind of metric, where output is much trickier to measure compared to something like global health.

  • Because of this, I'd encourage Mikolaj to do some of this work in public, eg outline his thoughts on how to do a cost-effectiveness analysis and to do an example one, and post it so that people can critique the methodology -- before going off and collecting all the data for the final report.

    • Also: it's possible that much of the value of this project would just be doing the cost effectiveness analysis for one or two orgs where people have a lot of uncertainty!

Main points in favor of this grant

I want to see more public impact analysis of AI safety organizations. To my knowledge, there has been very little of this to date.

Donor's main reservations

Mikolaj has some experience with impact analysis, but I suspect that this project will be quite hard and might need more funding.

Process for deciding amount

I decided to partly fund this project to give other donors room to contribute and mitigate my conflict of interest.

Conflicts of interest

I am Co-Director at MATS, Board-Member at LISA, and advise several AI safety projects, including Catalyze Impact and AI Safety ANZ. I often work out of FAR Labs. As a Manifund Regrantor, I regularly fund AI safety projects, the success of which is probably a determining factor in my future status as a Regrantor. To mitigate these obvious conflicts of interest, I ask that Mikolaj share his key results in a public database and post, where any discrepancies can be identified.

My rough plan is to break down the theories of change that are pursued in AIS down into:

• Evals

• Field-building

• Governance

• Research

And measure impact in each category seprately.

Evals can be measured by quality and number of evals, relevance to ex-risks. It seems pretty straightforward to differentiate a bad eval org from a good eval org—engaging with major labs, having a lot of evals, and a relation to existential risks.

Field-building—having a lot of participants who do awesome things after the project.

Research—I argue that the number of citations is also a good proxy for the impact of a paper. It's definitely easy to measure and is related to how much engagement a paper received. In the absence of any work done to bring the paper to the attention of key decision makers, it's very related to the engagement.

I'm not sure how to think about governance.