What progress have you made since your last update?

1. I have applied to two mini-grants -- The Pollination Project and The Awesome Foundation. I have also applied for a grant through EA Funds.

2. I have also pulled together a somewhat formal team to work on this project - David Reinstein and Ashley Meader from The Unjournal.

3. We still want to raise more funds for the tournament prize pool so we are putting together a shortlist of sample decision-relevant questions and the ways they could influence decisions in the animal movement to use for promo materials to attract donors

What are your next steps?

We aim to finish writing up the promo material in the next two weeks. We will also start vetting the current list of questions we have crowdsourced from the wider animal movement.

Is there anything others could help you with?

1. If you come across a highly decision-relevant question, send it our way!

2. If you know of someone who would be keen to donate to this project, please send them our way too!
   

This project is perfect. We need one place to any founder or them survey never stop and for all youth people . Mood locker here: https://manifund.org/projects/mood-locker-deep-tech-emotional-infrastructure-for-the-global-south-ikjhtkxuyje?tab=bids

Please can review this project a little or not. Thanks allow me up here: https://manifund.org/projects/mood-locker-deep-tech-emotional-infrastructure-for-the-global-south-ikjhtkxuyje

@niplav Thanks for the update! Will ping you in late-January if I haven’t heard anything by then.

Yeah, would love to see any intermediate data as it comes: saulsmunn at gmail

Looking forward to the results!

Hard vouch for the Seldon team, Finn and Esben are extremely fast moving with an in-depth understanding of the AI Safety For-profit space.

Plausibly mid February in case something comes up. We need to balance the downsides from being sleep deprived with collecting meaningful data, sorry it's taking so long.

@niplav I'll ask the other two how long they'll still take.

@saulmunn I'd guess late January. I have two or three blocks left but with Christmas + meditation retreat… I'll push the data already collected to Github.

Approving this project; we've been happy to host the first cohort of Seldon at Mox, and I'm excited for more incubation and support in the space of AI safety startups. Finn and Esben are doing good work and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

The project has started and initial setup is underway. The construct build process is in motion and the early growth work is being arranged. I will post another update once the build phase is fully underway.

@asilverbook Appreciate the support Aaron. I have started the early steps and will keep progress updates coming.

@Austin Thank you Austin. The first step is underway and I will post an update shortly.

Approving this project. This kind of biotech platform is a bit outside of Manifund's usual beat, but I'm encouraged by Aaron's donation to make this happen (I trust his expertise on this kind of scientific endeavor) and also Justin's past experience at Colossal, the company that de-extincted the direwolf.

Donating on identical thesis to previous grant -- I wish I could have gone in for more size then!

I haven't thought about expenses for RE; from my perspective, I'm also thinking of this funding as a bet on Sean.

Evaluation science uses deep statistics. For example, in the attack selection methodology I'm working with hierarchical Bayesian modeling, adaptive sampling, MCMC, etc.

Noting that a lot of stats we use at METR is intentionally pretty simple. E.g. I think we've never done Bayes, despite having many members of staff who would feel intuitively on board with that. Partly this is for communication clarity, partly because it gives less surface area to mess up.

@niplav On what date do you expect to have finished collecting the data?

Main points in favor of this grant

Donor's main reservations

1. Justin is currently making AI safety Youtube videos and I think he’s been great at writing these scripts. The channel he has done this for has skyrocketed and this will take him away from that. That said, I generally think people should work on that which they want to work on

2. Growth may take longer than expected, since YouTube’s discovery algorithm can be slow early on.

3. The best format is not known yet; Justin may be more effective as an off-screen narrator than an on-camera host.
   

Process for deciding amount

Justin made the budget. I thought it was reasonable though we discussed a lot what goes into making Youtube videos, making them good, etc. and reasonable costs.

Conflicts of interest

Please disclose e.g. any romantic, professional, financial, housemate, or familial relationships you have with the grant recipient(s).

None

I'm closing this project but Brier.fyi will continue to update - if you want to continue supporting that work, you can do so at https://github.com/sponsors/wasabipesto!

What progress have you made since your last update?

Here's a corpus of 5000 novels starring a friendly helpful harmless AI as friend and confidante: https://huggingface.co/datasets/dickbutkis/hyperstition/blob/main/Hyperstition%20Corpus%20v1.zip

What are your next steps?

We're aiming to create the proposed TurnTrout/Cloud dataset, running that downstream experiment. The vision is to evade existing misalignment narratives by generating stories about a "❖", a novel type of synthetic angel being, fine-tune a model on that corpus, and prepend all future prompts with "you are a ❖" to see if we have less misbehavior.

Is there anything others could help you with?

This next dataset will cost more compute and any gifts of compute would be welcome.

Let's improve the beauty waterline!

Another thing to say: it's not at all obvious to me that econ PhD work is the best use of Parker's time from my POV. I am not suggesting this grant because I want to support the econ PhD. I am suggesting this grant because I think the world would benefit from Parker having more freedom with his time, and this grant does that locally.

What progress have you made since your last update?

1. I have applied to two mini-grants -- The Pollination Project and The Awesome Foundation. I have also applied for a grant through EA Funds.

2. I have also pulled together a somewhat formal team to work on this project - David Reinstein and Ashley Meader from The Unjournal.

3. We still want to raise more funds for the tournament prize pool so we are putting together a shortlist of sample decision-relevant questions and the ways they could influence decisions in the animal movement to use for promo materials to attract donors

What are your next steps?

We aim to finish writing up the promo material in the next two weeks. We will also start vetting the current list of questions we have crowdsourced from the wider animal movement.

Is there anything others could help you with?

1. If you come across a highly decision-relevant question, send it our way!

2. If you know of someone who would be keen to donate to this project, please send them our way too!
   

This project is perfect. We need one place to any founder or them survey never stop and for all youth people . Mood locker here: https://manifund.org/projects/mood-locker-deep-tech-emotional-infrastructure-for-the-global-south-ikjhtkxuyje?tab=bids

Please can review this project a little or not. Thanks allow me up here: https://manifund.org/projects/mood-locker-deep-tech-emotional-infrastructure-for-the-global-south-ikjhtkxuyje

@niplav Thanks for the update! Will ping you in late-January if I haven’t heard anything by then.

Yeah, would love to see any intermediate data as it comes: saulsmunn at gmail

Looking forward to the results!

Hard vouch for the Seldon team, Finn and Esben are extremely fast moving with an in-depth understanding of the AI Safety For-profit space.

Plausibly mid February in case something comes up. We need to balance the downsides from being sleep deprived with collecting meaningful data, sorry it's taking so long.

@niplav I'll ask the other two how long they'll still take.

@saulmunn I'd guess late January. I have two or three blocks left but with Christmas + meditation retreat… I'll push the data already collected to Github.

Approving this project; we've been happy to host the first cohort of Seldon at Mox, and I'm excited for more incubation and support in the space of AI safety startups. Finn and Esben are doing good work and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

The project has started and initial setup is underway. The construct build process is in motion and the early growth work is being arranged. I will post another update once the build phase is fully underway.

@asilverbook Appreciate the support Aaron. I have started the early steps and will keep progress updates coming.

@Austin Thank you Austin. The first step is underway and I will post an update shortly.

Approving this project. This kind of biotech platform is a bit outside of Manifund's usual beat, but I'm encouraged by Aaron's donation to make this happen (I trust his expertise on this kind of scientific endeavor) and also Justin's past experience at Colossal, the company that de-extincted the direwolf.

Donating on identical thesis to previous grant -- I wish I could have gone in for more size then!

I haven't thought about expenses for RE; from my perspective, I'm also thinking of this funding as a bet on Sean.

Evaluation science uses deep statistics. For example, in the attack selection methodology I'm working with hierarchical Bayesian modeling, adaptive sampling, MCMC, etc.

Noting that a lot of stats we use at METR is intentionally pretty simple. E.g. I think we've never done Bayes, despite having many members of staff who would feel intuitively on board with that. Partly this is for communication clarity, partly because it gives less surface area to mess up.

@niplav On what date do you expect to have finished collecting the data?

Main points in favor of this grant

Donor's main reservations

1. Justin is currently making AI safety Youtube videos and I think he’s been great at writing these scripts. The channel he has done this for has skyrocketed and this will take him away from that. That said, I generally think people should work on that which they want to work on

2. Growth may take longer than expected, since YouTube’s discovery algorithm can be slow early on.

3. The best format is not known yet; Justin may be more effective as an off-screen narrator than an on-camera host.
   

Process for deciding amount

Justin made the budget. I thought it was reasonable though we discussed a lot what goes into making Youtube videos, making them good, etc. and reasonable costs.

Conflicts of interest

Please disclose e.g. any romantic, professional, financial, housemate, or familial relationships you have with the grant recipient(s).

None

I'm closing this project but Brier.fyi will continue to update - if you want to continue supporting that work, you can do so at https://github.com/sponsors/wasabipesto!

What progress have you made since your last update?

Here's a corpus of 5000 novels starring a friendly helpful harmless AI as friend and confidante: https://huggingface.co/datasets/dickbutkis/hyperstition/blob/main/Hyperstition%20Corpus%20v1.zip

What are your next steps?

We're aiming to create the proposed TurnTrout/Cloud dataset, running that downstream experiment. The vision is to evade existing misalignment narratives by generating stories about a "❖", a novel type of synthetic angel being, fine-tune a model on that corpus, and prepend all future prompts with "you are a ❖" to see if we have less misbehavior.

Is there anything others could help you with?

This next dataset will cost more compute and any gifts of compute would be welcome.

Let's improve the beauty waterline!

Another thing to say: it's not at all obvious to me that econ PhD work is the best use of Parker's time from my POV. I am not suggesting this grant because I want to support the econ PhD. I am suggesting this grant because I think the world would benefit from Parker having more freedom with his time, and this grant does that locally.