Agreed with the other answers on the reasons why there's no GiveWell for AI safety. But in case it's helpful, I should say that Longview Philanthropy offers advice to donors looking to give >$100K per year to AI safety. Our methodology is a bit different from GiveWell’s, but we do use cost-effectiveness estimates. We investigate funding opportunities across the AI landscape from technical research to field-building to policy in the US, EU, and around the world, trying to find the most impactful opportunities for the marginal donor. We also do active grantmaking, such as our calls for proposals on hardware-enabled mechanisms and digital sentience. More details here. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] if you'd like to learn more.
The simple answer is no, there is no AI safety GiveWell.
For two reasons:
but nobody has done it.Nuno Sempere created some cost-effectiveness models in 2021. This is the only effort like this that I'm aware of.In spite of the problems with cost-effectiveness estimates in AI safety, I still think they're underrated and that people should put more work into quantifying their beliefs.
BTW I am open to commissions to do this sort of work; DM me if you're interested. For example I recently made a back-of-the-envelope model comparing the cost-effectiveness of AnimalHarmBench vs. conventional animal advocacy for improving superintelligent AI's values with respect to animal welfare. That model should give a sense of what kind of result to expect. (Note for example the extremely made-up inputs.)
Thanks for the estimate, very helpful! The cost for AnimalHarmBench in particular was approximately 10x lower than assumed. 30k is my quick central overall estimate, mostly time cost of the main contributors. This excludes previous work, described in the article, and downstream costs. In-house implementation in AI companies could add to the cost a lot but I don't think this should enter the cost effectiveness calculation for comparison vs other forms of advocacy.
My impression was Nuno Sempere did a lot of this, e.g. here way back in 2021?
You might also enjoy https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/AbrRsXM2PrCrPShuZ and https://github.com/NunoSempere/SoGive-CSER-evaluation-public
My mistake, yes he did do that. I'll edit my answer.