EA - Announcing the AI Safety Field Building Hub, a new effort to provide AISFB projects, mentorship, and funding by Vael Gates

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the AI Safety Field Building Hub, a new effort to provide AISFB projects, mentorship, and funding, published by Vael Gates on July 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Tldr: If you’re interested in working on an AI safety field building project similar to those listed below (e.g. researcher outreach): please fill out this application form or nominate someone ($200 bounty)! Hiring is ongoing indefinitely. If you’re an EA org that has an AI safety field building project, please submit your project idea, and if our priorities and people align sufficiently we’ll try to get it done! [Crossposted to LessWrong] When individual EAs are interested in working on AI safety research, they can apply to many programs designed to give mentorship, funding, and project ideas (SERI MATS, MLAB, AI Safety Camp, SERI / CERI / CHERI summer programs, etc). This is amazing and speaks to our growth as a community. However, I think there’s a noticeable lack of such structure in field building. For EAs interested in AI safety field building, how do they know which projects are most promising? Do they have to make them up from scratch? Where do they get collaborators, how do they get access to mentorship, how do they show a good track record to apply for funding? To fill this gap, I’m starting the “AI Safety Field Building Hub”, a new effort to provide projects, mentorship, and funding to individuals interested in working in AI safety field building. If you’re an EA looking for a full-time or part-time project, I’m hiring project-specific contractors. I have a list of projects I’m interested in working on, have been sent more shovel-ready projects by others, and hope that other organizations will continue to send me great project ideas they don’t have capacity to manage. In the future, this “hub”-like functionality may spin into its own organization; at the moment, I’m looking to hire people to work for me. Of note, my projects tend to be aimed more at outreach and at older populations– AI researchers, academia and industry, rather than university populations or high schoolers— which I think is relatively neglected right now. I also think there are potentially more downside risks for doing outreach to researchers poorly than in reaching out to university students, and the culture is substantially different, so I’m hoping my experience in this space will be helpful to people who are interested in these directions. (About me: I’m currently a postdoc at Stanford whose most recent project was interviewing AI researchers about AI safety.) I’m aiming to hire agentic, independent, or small-team people who are excited about closely coordinating with me and other EAs. From that point, there are several options: For many of these projects, I’ll want people who are excited about closely coordinating in the beginning of the project and during key decision points, but then go on to truly own the project without further involvement from me. (I can help you with securing your own funding once you’re up and running.) Note that, however, several of the top projects listed here may have significant downside risks, so I’m going to be restrictive with hiring and training for this reason. I’m also interested in hiring people who work part-time on a single project under me indefinitely. This is especially true for many of the top-listed projects which could have significant downside risks. Finally, I’m hoping to hire an advanced PA-type person who will closely work with me across all of my projects (pay will be higher for this role) I’ll be offering mentorship like you’d find in a research program, and project-specific funding for you to work on the project (and all associated project costs) full-time or part-time. Some of the projects are more operations-oriented, some people-facing, some writing-or...