is there a quantitative model for money going to ai safety like this (http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2015/08/quantifyingaisafety/) but for donations ? not including far future utopia effects but just x-risk

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One can convert the utility-per-researcher into utility-per-dollar by dividing everything by a cost per researcher. So if before you would have 1e-6 x-risk reduction per researcher, and you also decide to value researchers at $1M/researcher, then your evaluation in terms of cost is 1e-12 x-risk per dollar.

For some values (i.e. fake numbers but still acceptable for comparing orders-of-magnitude of cause areas) that I've saw used: The Oxford Prioritisation Project uses 1.8 million (lognormal distribution between $1M and $3M) for a MIRI researcher over their career, 80,000 Hours implicitly uses ~$100,000/year/worker in their yardsticks comparing cause areas, and Effective Altruism orgs in the 2018 talent survey claim to value their junior hires at $450k and senior hires at $3M on average (over three years).

ok, im not sure if ai researchers get paid that much though

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Tetraspace
5y
The cost per researcher is typically larger than what they get paid, since it also includes overhead (administration costs, office space, etc).
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Gordon Seidoh Worley
5y
Right. For comparison software engineers (of all kinds, including ML engineers) at early-stage startups generally add between $500k and $1mm to the company's valuation, i.e. investors believe these employees make the company worth buying/selling for that much additional money. There's a lot that goes into where that number comes from, but it does at least suggest that O($1mm) is reasonable.
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rafa_fanboy
5y
whats the charity overhead for something like miri or fhi?
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Tetraspace
5y
In MIRI's fundraiser they released their 2019 budget estimate, which spends about half on research personnel. I'm not sure how this compares to similar organizations.