This is a quick post to officially announce that AI Safety Support is on an indefinite pause. We have been on pause for a while now, but I wanted to make it official. I might have more to say on this later but expect that if I wait till I write a longer explanation, it will not happen.
I’m calling it a pause because maybe AI Safety Support does reopen in some capacity in the future, possibly with a different person running it.
A lack of funding is a part of the decision but is not the only factor. That is to say that I’m not looking for offers of funding.
AI Safety Support Ltd, the Australian-based charity, supports several other projects and will continue to do so. None of these projects should be affected by this.
If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments here, but I may not respond to them.
It has been a wild ride these last few years. I have so much love and appreciation for everyone I have worked with.
Thank you all so much.
Yes, burnt out. Yes, lack of funds.
AISS ran out of funding while waiting for a decision from the LTFF. In my original post I said I wasn’t looking for funding, because I had reached a point where even if the project got fully funded I would not want to be running it when we next needed funding.
My requests would mostly be around better communication. Despite waiting so long for a decision that we ran out of funding and I gave up would seem like I would want decisions to be faster. I think there are some much easier wins around communication that would drastically improve the applicant experience independent of how long it takes to process a decision.
Only a few days after I posted this update I found out that the reason LTFF hadnt made a decision on my grant is that they were low on funding. If we had been below their normal funding bar we would have already been rejected. Just having this information could have critical.
A few weeks earlier I was talking to an individual that could have personally funded AISS for a year. Their main hesitation for not funding us was that LTFF still hadn’t decided. They assumed LTFF has some concerns that they are not aware of. They assumed that LTFF was not funding constrained. At that moment if I had know LTFFs real position I could have told this to the donor and helped my and LTFFs funding problem.