What concerns are there that you think the mechanize founders haven't considered? I haven't engaged with their work that much, but it seems like they have been part of the AI safety debate for years now, with plenty of discussion on this Forum and elsewhere (e.g. I can't think of many AIS people that have been as active on this Forum as @Matthew_Barnett has been for the last few years). I feel like they have communicated their models and disagreements a (more than) fair amount already, so I don't know what you would expect to change in further discussions?

@Toby Tremlett🔹 is there a way to see the final debate week banner? I wanted to include a screenshot in the slides for my local group's next meetup, but can't find a way to access the banner now that debate week is over.

I appreciate the context, thank you. However, two points came to mind:

1. It seems like the purpose is quite different from the medium-sized university department you described, running workshops and retreats vs what standard academic departments do (offices, lecture halls, labs). So I'm not sure how good the comparison is
2. You point out that in the context of university buildings, it's not a lot of money. But in the context of CEA's other spending, it does seem like a lot. CEA received $14 million in funding from FTX^[1], which has been discussed a lot. So it's understandable that spending a supposedly similar amount of money on a single venue without much public explanation will raise some eyebrows.

Either way, I don't think anyone can really judge whether the investment was a good decision based on the currently availabe information. Which is why I'd appreciate a more detailed explanation from CEA.

1. ^{^}

   number taken from the wiki entry on CEA. I chose to use this comparison because I couldn't immediately find recent numbers for how much money CEA is spending in total, but I assume that 15 million is a significant portion of it.