Thanks so much, @MarcusAbramovitch!

I will just add that we initially asked to fun the residency in general and this is one of many projects that the program is working towards. Allen and Aidan are taking leadership roles within the program.

I’m excited to support this. I’m especially glad to see an explicitly AI-pilled animal welfare fund. If AI changes the world as much as many of us expect, animal welfare strategy needs to adapt now rather than assume business as usual or wait until it is potentially too late and we lose the window of opportunity.

I’m also strongly supportive of grantmaking that can move quickly and give applicants useful feedback. That feels especially important for early-stage projects in a fast-moving space.

I think this is a really good idea and the animal movement hasn't historically participated in forecasting or participation in prediction markets. Even if the answers don't end up being useful or action guiding, I think the tournament will still have value in getting smart people to think about these questions and helping animal welfare advocates to better anticipate what might happen in the future.

Also, Aditi is one of the most dedicated people I know and I saw her take this from an idea on Slack to this detailed project proposal with collaborators!

Hey just tested out the app. Works very smoothly.

a couple points of feedback:

I think there is an opportunity to add a bit more education. The words in the beginning were really nice, but I can't find them again once I enter the app. It would be nice to have some sort of clickable link (maybe a pop up in the section where they select the food or in the history section where it explains the reasoning or definition of the units). Also, fish, chicken, and shrimp have way outsized impacts to beef and pork have you considered differentiating these?

Have you seen foodimpacts.org? You could see if you can embed the graph here into the app as an interactive education tool and edit the units based on the impact of each food type. You can also create links or do a collab with Farmkind which offers donation offsets for people who consume animal products. That way, people can have multiple ways to help animals.

also, the total of plant/animal portions a day on the history tab should be on top for better UX.

Description of subprojects and results, including major changes from the original proposal

Spending breakdown

See details here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KWpyRXzHn6JMyZiBn/ai-for-animals-2025-bay-area-retrospective

@camberg23 Glad that you have given this some thought and have a hard deadline for publication. Good luck with the film, and I look forward to watching it this fall!

My 2 cents: I'm a bit concerned about documentaries because I know many people who spend years creating documentaries only to get stuck by not being able to find a distribution platform for them. They often then go on arduous film festival circuits to gain some recognition and reviews to be able to get a distribution deal, but even that often doesn't work out.

If you want to release it for free on Youtube then that works fine, but high viewership is not a given, especially if you do not have have a highly subscribed channel or a big promotion plan.

I would say that the biggest failure risk for this project is spending a lot of time on a film that no one outside of our small community watches.

You can always record the emergent behaviors for the film so that you can show they existed even if AI companies later obfuscate them, but you can't get the time and money back if you end up stuck at the distribution stage.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We had the conference and went way over the initial budget. Read the full retrospective here.

We think conferences and field building are really impactful interventions at this time and AI for Animals seems uniquely well positioned to continue organizing and/or supporting these events.

What are your next steps?

Doing one more fundraising push for this before we close up the page.

Building up our Slack community.

Organizing the London and NYC 2025 AI, Animals, and Digital Minds conferences later this year.

Is there anything others could help you with?

Besides donations, we are also looking to build up the talent/opportunity pipeline in this space. If you have any suggestions, please send a DM!

Description of subprojects and results, including major changes from the original proposal

This project was mostly completely retroactively funded through Manifund! Thank you.

Spending breakdown

Please see budget linked in proposal.

@RyanKidd thank you for your donation and the thoughtful analysis of our work!

I was somewhat familiar with the tradeoffs between putting value constraints on AI and their general reasoning performance, but didn't know about the terminology of corrigibility and the long reflection. Bob Fisher's talk "Animal-friendly AI = Misaligned AI" during the conference was great for introducing this concept to the AIxAnimals community and it largely arose because of conversations he had during EAG London. I have since shared your comments with the AI Coalition channel on the Hive Slack and I think it has helped to establish some shared language with the AI Safety community.

FWIW I did try to get Rob Long as a speaker, but it didn't work out. I've since been talking more with Rob about whether or not it makes sense to mix discussions of animals and digital minds together.

Thanks for pointing out the EA Animal Welfare Fund (EA AWF). I had applied/inquired with 4 grantmakers in the EA/AI Safety/Animal Welfare spaces and didn't have much success. I was very over capacity at this time (and still am) and thought that given this past track record with grant makers and knowing from experience that the EA AWF application process is on the more time consuming side, the expected value of the work I put into applying would be quite low. I think once I have more capacity and hire a program lead for AI for Animals, I will consider submitting an application to EA AWF.

@Tomohaire it was in the UK! Next year I'm thinking about having it in the Bay Area, but if you want to carry it on in the UK, I support that.

@Austin thanks for the encouragement to post on Manifund and for the cheering on the creation of the behind the scenes document. I actually almost didn't post that doc because I doubted anyone would be interested in it. Happy to know that isn't the case!

I've watched Michael's videos before and think that they are already quite good quality. It is really hard getting views on Youtube and he has managed to get quite a lot. Also, his recent video that talked about the potential sentience of brain organoids used for computation was seen by the co-founder of the company that creates them! That right there could be incredibly impactful.

@partlygloudy that's great to hear! Onto the next project then :)

Actually, how would it be different than GFI's database and Talist's job board?

I looked through his website and projects and was quite impressed with it. I think this website should definitely exist if it doesn't already.