Update: A lot of people disagree with this post on the basis that we might already be past the crunch time. I think this is a plausible view, but this post is mainly designed to encourage the audience with longer timelines to keep in mind movement-building lag times when thinking about how urgent things are.
An increasing number of people are starting to believe that timelines may be short.
I find this worrying as a movement builder, since movement-building projects are much less impactful when timelines are short.
Let's consider what has to happen for an outreach program to hit its full potential. It could be a fellowship, a local meetup group or online outreach. You plan the program, then run it. You then iterate on it so that it is effective, after which you scale it up. You then need time for a decent number of people to pass through the program - naively, five cohorts can produce five times as many safety researchers as one. These people have to then advance their careers to the point where they are capable of doing useful research, then they have to actually do this research.
Let's consider a hypothetical example. You start a local AI Safety group. Your initial activities have some impact, but it takes you two years to develop a really solid set of programs. It takes you another two years to scale up the group. You (or your successor) run the group for 5 years. Group members take five years to become capable researchers, and then spend five years doing effective research. Notice that the total time is nineteen years, and it could be longer if we thought that people didn't tend to be effective until ten years in.
This is worrying. The time crunch for technical research might be coming soon, but the time crunch for movement building might be now. Obviously, it would be possible to focus outreach on more established researchers, but there are reasons why outreach has tended to focus on people who are earlier in their careers. More junior people tend have much more time to engage, and young people tend to be most open to new ideas. I'm not saying this to discourage people from enaging in outreach to experienced researchers, but rather to point out that even though it is possible to focus on forms of outreach with shorter timelines, if we have to do so, then this makes things more challenging than they would otherwise be.
My main intent is to encourage people who think they might be good AI Safety movement builders to pursue this sooner rather than later. I would be especially excited to see people who are engaged in general EA movement building to pass that onto a successor (if someone competent is available) and transition towards AI Safety specific movement building.
I'd also love to see funders make an effort to encourage more (high quality) projects in this space. Even though the EA Infrastructure Fund exists and is relatively generous in giving out grants, I still think that there is value in creating more specific programs in terms of drawing in more applications. I may write a post on this in the future, but I think a) it is better to have more brands for marketing reasons b) it would be possible to craft the programs to meet the specific needs of these kinds of projects.
I'm a little surprised by your perspective. My impression is that Open Phil, EA Infrastructure, FTX, Future Flourishing, etc. are all eagerly funding AI safety stuff. Who else are you imagining funding this space who isn't already?
Also, a bunch of EA community organizers are pushing AI risks substantially harder as a cause area now than they did 5 years ago (e.g. 80k, many university groups).
If you're worried about short timelines, shouldn't the push be to transition people from meta work on community building to object level work directly on alignment?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Let me know if I misunderstood something.
There's a reason why companies often have multiple brands instead of one. It lets you reach more people. If you created the AI Safety Movement Building Fund and there was literally no difference between it and the EA Infrastructure Fund (same people evaluating and everything), you would still get more applications because lots of people make snap judgments based on a name. (Though in retrospect I'm feeling much less confident about this idea b/c movement-builders are disproportionately likely to know about what opportunities are available).
If I was more confident in short-timelines then I would be more supportive of this. I would say I'm more worried about short-timelines (25-70% chance) than confident in them. Another reason for being wary about this strategy is that most of our survival probability might be in timelines that are longer.