I'm regranting 40k to this on the basis that I think there are few people thinking seriously about how to solve AI alignment and Thane seems to be one of them, and I have been impressed by a bunch of Thane's LW posts.

I think that my median case view is that this doesn't end up mattering because this agenda seems very hard and unlikely to pan out. Nevertheless, I think it's big if true, and relatively cheap to fund, and pretty neglected (relative to empirical ML stuff) at the current margin. And I'd guess that this is the type of grant that's relatively less legible to most grantmakers, and so I wouldn't expect it to get funded via default sources (or for it to be dramatically underfunded).

I think it'd be pretty silly if Thane (and others like them) don't move to the US and collaborate in person with people that would speed them up a lot due to funding bottlenecks.

Clarification: this work doesn't get funded by Good Ventures. OP may still recommend grants of this type to non-Good Ventures donors. In practice, this means the pool of possible funding is still much smaller, so I think the argument stands.

I think this is very promising. This team seems to have some of the people who have the clearest thoughts in the world about acausal interactions. I've asked several people who I trust a lot in this space and gotten universally positive references about the team.

My main concern is that thinking about acausal interactions is extremely difficult (meaning that zero progress is somewhat likely) and sign uncertain (so, even if they did make progress, it's not clear this would be net helpful). Overall, my view is that it still seems good to have some people working on this, and I trust this team in particular to be thoughtful about the tradeoffs.

Also, this type of work doesn't get funded by OP.

I'm donating at least $10k (via Manifund).

I think Lightcone has been hugely impactful (see the above, which I think is very compelling evidence of a large amount of impact), and can't get funded from many of the usual places.

COI Note: Lightcone contracted with AI Futures Project (the org I work for) on AI 2027, and is continuing to contract with us on followup work. This is a donation for general support, and not anything like payment for services received.

I'm donating $10k, and I think there's a good chance I'll come back and end up donating more.

I think that AI Digest has done great work and will be able to put marginal funding to good use. Stuff I'm particularly excited about in the past:

• The Agent Village. I think getting real world experience seeing how AI agents will interact with tasks outside the narrow confines of a benchmark suite is a neglected form of capability evaluation.

• Various explainers, especially the one of the METR graph.

Main reservations:

• Nothing jumps out to me.

Conflicts of Interest:

No COIs.