All of matt's Comments + Replies
We’re absolutely open to (and all interested in) catastrophic risks other than artificial intelligence. The fund is the long term future fund, and we believe that catastrophic risks are highly relevant to our long term future.
Trying to infer the motivation for the question I can add that in my own modelling getting AGI right seems highly important, and is the thing I’m most worried about, but I’m far from certain that another of the catastrophic risks we face won’t be catastrophic enough to threaten our existence or to delay progress toward AGI until civil
...We’re open to both. My personal opinion is that there are some excellent existing orgs in the long term future space, and that that’s the effectiveness hurdle that smaller projects have to get over to justify funding, but that there are many smaller things that should be done that don’t require as much funding as the existing larger orgs, and their smaller funding needs can have a higher expected value than those marginal dollars going to one of the existing orgs. I expect our future funding to split 50-70% larger orgs / 30-50% smaller projects (note Habryka's different estimate of the split).
This is the sort of question I could easily spend a lot of time trying to forge a perfect answer to, so I’m going to instead provide a faster and probably less satisfying first try, and time permitting come back and clarify.
I see significant justification for the existence of the fund being pooling funds from several sources to justify more research than individual donors would justify given the size of their donations (there are other good reasons for the fund to exist; this is one of them). I’d like to have the expert team spend as much time as the size
...What do you mean by 'expert team' in this regard? In particular, if you consider yourself or the other fund managers to be experts, would you being willing to qualify or operationalize that expertise?
I ask because when the EA Fund management teams were first announced, there was a question about why there weren't 'experts' in the traditional sense on the team, i.e., what makes you think you'd be as good as managing the Long-Term Future Fund as a Ph.D. in AI, biosecurity, or nuclear security (assuming when we talk about 'l...
Hi Dunja, I'm Matt Fallshaw, Chair of the fund. This response is an attempt to be helpful, but I'm not entirely sure what, in answer to your question, would qualify as a qualification; perhaps it's relevant that I've been following the field for over 10 years, I've been an advisor to MIRI (I joined their Board of Directors in 2014 (a position I recently had to give up) and currently spend approaching half of my time working on MIRI projects) and I'm an advisor to BERI. I chose the expert team (in consultation with Marek Duda), and I chose them for (among o...
Hi Matt, thanks a lot for the reply! I appreciate your approach, but I do have worries, which Jonas, for instance, is very well aware of (I have been a strong critic of EAF policy and implementation of research grants, including those directed at MIRI and FRI).
My main worry is that evaluating grants aimed at research cannot be done without having them assessed by expert researchers in the given domain, that is, people who have a proven track-record in the given field of research. I think the best way to see why this matters is to take any other scientific ...
(That’s two questions, Peter. I’ll answer the first and Oli the second, in separate comments for discussion threading.)
Yes, we do plan to continue soliciting projects via application (applicants can email us at ealongtermfuture@gmail.com). We also all travel in circles that expose us to granting-suitable projects. Closer to our next funding round (February) we will more actively seek applications.