Thanks a lot for writing this!
I read this post back in 2020 and I've been using FVP regularly since then, so you've had a decent bit of impact on my life!
As a temporary measure in response to uncertainty about our future funding levels, we’ve put the bottom ~40% of grants above our current funding bar on hold.
Did you notify these applicants about their applications being put on hold?
(I just talked to an LTFF applicant who didn't know about this measure, and they suspected that their application might be one of those which have been put on hold.)
Update: We did a follow-up survey 4 months after the retreat, asking participants what impact the retreat had on them. Here is a summary of the responses:
(Note that the survey consisted of a free text field, and the categories I made up for summarizing the results are pretty subjective. Also note that some people mentioned that they started projects or applied for things, but would have done so even without the retreat. I did not include those in my count.)
I think these results are really helpful to improve the picture of how such a retreat is valuable for people!
The biggest surprise for me is the amount of tangible results (research collaborations, getting into SERI MATS, concrete projects, career changes) that came out of the retreat. There were 9 people who said in the feedback form that they want to start a project as a result of the retreat (the form they filled out right at the end of the retreat). I would have guessed that maybe 5 would actually follow through after the initial motivation directly after the retreat has worn off. And I think that would have been a very good result already. Instead, it was more than 9 people who started projects after the retreat!
I still have the intuition that the more vague effects of the retreat (such as feeling part of a community) are really important, potentially more so than the tangible outcomes. And these vague things are probably not measured very well by a survey that asks “What impact did the retreat have on you?”, because it is just easier to remember concrete than vague things.
Overall, these survey results make me even more excited about this kind of AI safety retreat!
Hi JJ, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work!
I used the fiscal sponsorship, the free health coaching, the AISS newsletter, and the alignment slack, and found all of them super helpful! And probably I've used even more things which of I'm not even aware that they are coming from AISS.
I particularly appreciate your lots of links page. It's one of my favorite resources for an overview of which things exist in the AI safety ecosystem.
I hope whatever you are up to next goes well!
I think the value comes from:
I find it hard to say which of these is most important, and they are also highly entangled with each other
I just saw that 80000hours' technical AI safety research career review was based on this post!
I have found this post super valuable when it came out, and I have sent it to lots of people who are starting out in technical AI safety since then.
Do you think now it makes more sense to send them the career review instead? Or does it still make sense for them to read both?