You’re shifting your resources, but should you change your branding?

Focusing on new articles and research about AGI is one thing, but choosing to brand yourselves as an AI-focused career organisation is another.

Personal story (causal thinking): I first discovered the EA principles while researching how to do good in my career, where, aside from 80k, all the well-ranked websites were non-impact focused. If the website had been specifically about AI or existential risk careers, I’m quite sure I would’ve skipped it and spent years not discovering EA principles. But by discovering those principles and diving deeper into the content, I eventually saw existential risk as a top priority. Last year, the biggest chunk of my donations went to AI. I also managed the translation of your guide into French, and now, through Mieux Donner (the French effective giving initiative I co-founded), we’ll likely raise donations to fund several AI positions.

Trade-off (statistical thinking): How many people might be deterred from engaging with EA and this AGI topic because of AI branding? How many people are not working in AI because your homepage, About Us and menu bar mention other cause areas? (Especially considering your next career guide will still be multi-cause, and the information shouldn't have time to become outdated given the AGI timeline you mentioned.)

Your focus seems well thought out, but my guess regarding the branding is that you shouldn’t change it.

By shifting to a narrow AI focus, you risk reducing by 13.5% the source of effective do-gooders (including donors!) is one negative consequence. However, I can also think of other potential downsides:

• Damage to EA’s reputation: This could feed into TESCREAL critics and prevent presenting EA principles to many potential supporters.
• Potential lost opportunities: Even for your own organisation, focusing solely on AGI could cause you to lose out on backlinks, partnerships, and references that bring a steady flow of people.

As I read through your post, I’m still uncertain about what you plan with your branding. However, staying as a nonprofit that helps people use their careers to solve the world's most pressing problems, while focusing the majority of resources on AGI but maintaining low-hanging fruits in other areas, seems to me to have a more positive impact than shifting your branding entirely.

So please, don’t mess up the communication—it could have a net-negative effect on all the cause areas.