Can you put something on here to the effect of: "Eliezer Yudkowsky continues to claim that anybody who comes to him with a really good AGI alignment idea can and will be funded."

Should GiveWell's incubation grants be listed?
https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants

(And there are other adjacent programmes like Evidence Action.)

What about Charity Entrepreneurship?

Added these to the airtable: 

SoGive grants: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3xwou3EKRerCjQgBJ/launching-sogive-grants
The Century Fellowship: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/other-areas/century-fellowship
University Organizer Fellowship: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/other-areas/university-organizer-fellowship

AI Safety Impact Markets

Description provided to me by one of the organizers: 

This is a public platform for AI safety projects where funders can find you. You shop around for donations from donors that already have a high donor score on the platform, and their donations will signal-boost your project so that more donors and funders will see it. 

I'll add suggested things to the post itself if people provide me with full text I can directly copy in (like the name with a link to the relevant page, followed by a summary). Otherwise I'll let the comments cover things, to save myself time. 

Also, JJ Hepburn has now created an Airtable with similar info, which you can view the outputs of here. That currently complements this post, and could supersede this post if someone takes ownership of adding things there, updating the info, and ironing out potential glitches. Please contact me if you're interested in doing that.

Thanks for making this. Did you consider making this into an Airtable? It could also be a Google spreadsheet, but I think an Airtable would work better. 

An Airtable would be slightly easier to manage and update over time than a post, and it would also be easier to filter and scan through (i.e. if you had columns for cause areas, usual grant amounts, and application deadlines)

New opportunity: Announcing the Clearer Thinking Regrants program

Do you have an idea for a project, or run an existing project, startup, or organization that could one day have a big positive impact on the future of the world? Apply now to our brand new Clearer Thinking Regrants program!

We plan to award grants to around 20 selected altruistic projects (depending on the quality and relevance of submissions we receive).

Grants will be a minimum of $10,000 per project, up to a conceivable maximum of $500,000. These projects don’t have to relate to Clearer Thinking’s mission, they just have to be aimed at improving the future!

We have designed the first round of the application to be completed in a single sitting of just 20 minutes. 

If you know of any projects, non-profits, or startups that aim to improve the future of the world, regardless of which stage they’re in, please share the application form with them. 

We want to hear about as many great projects as we can! Applications are now open! Apply by 11:59pm Eastern Time July 15th, 2022.

Apply now for funding (designed to take ~20 minutes)

What about individual Earning To Givers?

Is there some central place where all the people doing Earning To Give are listed, potentially with some minimal info about their potential max grant size and the type of stuff they are happy to fund?

If not, how do ETGers usually find non-standard funding opportunities? Just personal networks?

$20 Million in NSF Grants for Safety Research

After a year of negotiation, the NSF has announced a $20 million request for proposals for empirical AI safety research.

Here is the detailed program description.

The request for proposals is broad, as is common for NSF RfPs. Many safety avenues, such as transparency and anomaly detection, are in scope

Clearer Thinking also gives out "micro grants": https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/submit-an-idea-to-our-2nd-annual-micro-grants-program-to-win-up-to-595 

I've just now learned of www.futurefundinglist.com, which seems also relevant (though I haven't looked at it closely or tried to assess how useful it'd be to people)

Adjacent opportunity: grants from Scott Alexander / Astral Codex Ten https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant 

Also the adjacent Emergent Ventures grants https://www.mercatus.org/emergent-ventures 

The AI Safety Fundamentals opportunities board, filtered for "funding" as the opportunity type, is probably also useful. 

Welcome to Apply: The 2024 Vitalik Buterin Fellowships in AI Existential Safety by FLI!

AI Safety Support have a list of funding opportunities. I'm pretty sure all of them are already in this post + comments section, but it's plausible that'll change in future. 

See also An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation for indications of some additional non-EA funding opportunities relevant to AI safety (e.g. for people doing PhDs or further academic work). 

Announcing Manifund Regrants

Manifund is launching a new regranting program! We will allocate ~$2 million over the next six months based on the recommendations of our regrantors. Grantees can apply for funding through our site; we’re also looking for additional regrantors and donors to join.

Nonlinear Support Fund: Productivity grants for people working in AI safety

Get up to $10,000 a year for therapy, coaching, consulting, tutoring, education, or childcare

[...]

You automatically qualify for up to $10,000 a year if:

• You work full time on something helping with AI safety
  • Technical research
  • Governance
  • Graduate studies
  • Meta (>30% of beneficiaries must work in AI safety)
• You or your organization received >$40,000 of funding to do the above work from any one of these funders in the last 365 days
  • Open Philanthropy
  • The EA Funds (Infrastructure or Long-term)
  • The Survival and Flourishing Fund
  • Longview Philanthropy
• Your organization does not pay for these services already
• (Only if you're applying for therapy or child care) You make less than $100,000. There are no income qualifiers for any other services we provide.

As long as you meet these criteria, you will qualify. Funding is given out in the order the applications were received. (For more details about how the fund works and why we made it read here)

What services can you apply for?

• Therapy (only if you make less than $100,000)
• Coaching
• Consultants* (e.g. management, operations, IT, marketing, etc)
• Childcare (only if you make less than $100,000)
• Tutors (e.g. ML, CS, English, etc) 
• Meditation classes 
• Mental health apps
• Books (either for your mental health or that's relevant to your work)
• Anything educational that helps you do better at your work (e.g. classes, books, workshops, etc)

*Consultant can mean a lot of things. In the context of the Nonlinear Support Fund, it refers to people who give you advice on how to do better at your work. It does not refer to people who are more like contract hires, who actually go and do the work for you. 

Apply to >30 AI safety funders in one application with the Nonlinear Network

See also this detailed breakdown of potential funding options for EA (community-building-type) groups specifically.

Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events

First part of the post:

"We (Open Phil) are seeking applications from grantees affected by the recent collapse of the FTX Future Fund (FTXFF) who fall within our long-termist focus areas (biosecurity, AI risk, and building the long-termist EA community). If you fit the following description, please fill out this application form.

We’re open to applications from:

• Grantees who never received some or all of their committed funds from FTXFF.
• Grantees who received funds, but want to set them aside to return to creditors or depositors.
  • We think there could be a number of complex considerations here, and we don’t yet have a clear picture of how we’ll treat requests like these. We’d encourage people to apply if in doubt, but to avoid making assumptions about whether you’ll be funded (and about what our take will end up being on what the right thing to do is for your case). (Additionally, we’re unsure if there will be legal barriers to returning funds.) That said, we’ll do our best to respond to urgent requests quickly, so you have clarity as soon as possible.
• Grantees whose funding was otherwise affected by recent events.^[1]"
   

SFF Speculation Grants as an expedited funding source

"Hi everyone, SFF has received numerous emails recently from organizations interested in expedited funding.  I believe a number of people here already know about SFF Speculation Grants, but since we've never actually announced our existence on the EA Forum before:

The Survival and Flourishing Fund has a means of expediting funding requests at any time of year, via applications to our Speculation Grants program:

https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants

SFF Speculation Grants are expedited grants organized by SFF outside of our biannual grant-recommendation process (the S-process). “Speculation Grantors” are volunteers with budgets to make these grants. Each Speculation Grantor’s budget grows or increases with the settlement of budget adjustments that we call “impact futures” (explained further below). Currently, we have a total of ~20 Speculation Grantors, with a combined budget of approximately $10MM (up from $4MM initially). Our process and software infrastructure for funding these grants were co-designed by Andrew Critch and Oliver Habryka.

For instructions on how to apply, please visit the link above.

For general information about the Survival and Flourishing Fund, see:

https://survivalandflourishing.fund/"

Another opportunity: Amplify creative grants

Some info from that post:

We're announcing a small grants program for creative media, supported by Hear This Idea and the FTX Future Fund regranting program.

[...]

Over the next few months, we’re aiming to make grants to podcasts and other creative media projects that spread ideas to help humanity navigate this century.

We’re interested in applications that look to cover topics related to (i) reducing existential risk, (ii) helping fix pressing global problems, and (iii) putting humanity on a positive long-term trajectory. More details on all three below.

We want to amplify ideas associated with effective altruism and longtermism, but you don’t need to be actively engaged with effective altruism to apply.

We’re excited to support projects (new and existing) in English and other languages — sharing important ideas with new, global, audiences.

If you are unsure whether your idea fits among the areas we outline below, please lean toward applying— we want to hear your ideas! The form is a single page of questions, and should easily take less than an hour. The first batch of grants will be approved around three weeks after this announcement. After that, we’ll approve grants on a rolling basis. Let us know if you have a deadline you need to hear back by, and we’ll do our best to accommodate and get back very quickly if necessary. If you have any questions which aren’t answered below, please contact us on grants@hearthisidea.com.

You can apply now by following this link.

[...]

October 22nd update: we've been really impressed with the number and quality of applications over the last few weeks; enough to disburse all of our initial pot to the (successful) applications we have already received. As such, we will no longer be actively considering new applications for the first set of grants. However, we will keep the application form open as a way to express interest in case we renew the program. Thanks for your understanding!

What follows was previously a section of this post, but I've moved it into the comments instead to keep the post more focused on the most useful content.

Previously open Open Phil funding opportunities

One reason I’m compiling these is that I imagine some might be run again in future. But that’s just a guess. 

But note that, in any case, people interested in these funding opportunities may find that one of the currently open opportunities suits them, such as the “Early-career funding for individuals interested in improving the long-term future” grants program.

Open Philanthropy Technology Policy Fellowship 

“Open Philanthropy is seeking applicants for a US policy fellowship program focused on high-priority emerging technologies, especially AI and biotechnology. Selected applicants will receive policy-focused training and mentorship and be supported in matching with a host organization for a full-time, fully-funded fellowship based in the Washington, DC area. Potential host organizations include executive branch offices, Congressional offices, and think tank programs.

Fellowship placements are expected to begin in early or mid-2022 and to last 6 or 12 months (depending on the fellowship category), with potential renewal for a second term. Fellowship opportunities are available for both entry-level and mid-career applicants, and for people both with and without prior policy experience.

The application deadline has now passed.”

Funding for Study and Training Related to AI Policy Careers 

“This program aims to provide flexible support for individuals who want to pursue or explore careers in AI policy1 (in industry, government, think tanks, or academia) for the purpose of positively impacting eventual societal outcomes from “transformative AI,” by which we mean potential future AI that precipitates a transition at least as significant as the industrial revolution (see here). This program is part of our grantmaking focus area related to transformative AI (explained here).

The application window is now closed.”

From the EA Groups Newsletter:

"Group Support Funding is now MUCH faster and easier! Please apply!

You can now apply for a lump sum to spend flexibly – no need to have your budget sorted in advance. Or you can apply for rapid funding to get funds within 2 or 7 days.

Group Support Funding covers event costs like food and venue hire, as well as advertising, books, software, subscriptions, and other group costs. These funds are available for all EA groups that are not already on a CEA Community Building Grant, including city groups, university groups, national groups, online groups, and specialist groups such as cause or career specific groups.

We believe most groups could usefully spend more money than they have in the past, so we encourage you to apply! 

Group Support Grant

The main type of funding is now the flexible Group Support Grant

You apply for a lump sum of money to pay for future expenses for up to 12 months. You don’t need to know your expenses or your total budget in advance – just apply for a lump sum and use our guidelines to help you decide how to spend it. 

You can reapply when your funding gets low, and if you don’t spend all your funds you can return the money or ask to use the funds in your next application. 

There is no specific limit on the amount of money groups can request, but we’ve set some suggested amounts, which range from 3000 USD per year for small groups, through to 12,000 USD per year for larger groups. 

The application and review processes require far less information than in the past.

Groups will get their funds within 2 weeks (US, UK), or 3 weeks (other countries), but you can request for your grant to be processed faster if needed. 

We think most groups should apply for a Group Support Grant! 

Rapid Group Support Funding

We are also offering Rapid Group Support Funding, which is for urgent requests for reimbursement or for costs that need to be paid within 1 month. You should get your funds within 2 working days (US, UK groups), or 7 working days (other countries)."

Here's more info on Open Phil's 4 requests for proposals for certain areas of technical AI safety work, copied from the Alignment Newsletter. 

Request for proposals for projects in AI alignment that work with deep learning systems (Nick Beckstead and Asya Bergal) (summarized by Rohin): Open Philanthropy is seeking proposals for AI safety work in four major areas related to deep learning, each of which I summarize below. Proposals are due January 10, and can seek up to $1M covering up to 2 years. Grantees may later be invited to apply for larger and longer grants.

Rohin's opinion: Overall, I like these four directions and am excited to see what comes out of them! I'll comment on specific directions below.

 

RFP: Measuring and forecasting risks (Jacob Steinhardt) (summarized by Rohin): Measurement and forecasting is useful for two reasons. First, it gives us empirical data that can improve our understanding and spur progress. Second, it can allow us to quantitatively compare the safety performance of different systems, which could enable the creation of safety standards. So what makes for a good measurement?

1. Relevance to AI alignment: The measurement exhibits a failure mode that becomes worse as models become larger, or tracks a potential capability that may emerge with further scale (which in turn could enable deception, hacking, resource acquisition, etc).

2. Forward-looking: The measurement helps us understand future issues, not just those that exist today. Isolated examples of a phenomenon are good if we have nothing else, but we’d much prefer to have a systematic understanding of when a phenomenon occurs and how it tends to quantitatively increase or decrease with various factors. See for example scaling laws (AN #87).

3. Rich data source: Not all trends in MNIST generalize to CIFAR-10, and not all trends in CIFAR-10 generalize to ImageNet. Measurements on data sources with rich factors of variation are more likely to give general insights.

4. Soundness and quality: This is a general category for things like “do we know that the signal isn’t overwhelmed by the noise” and “are there any reasons that the measurement might produce false positives or false negatives”.

What sorts of things might you measure?

1. As you scale up task complexity, how much do you need to scale up human-labeled data to continue to maintain good performance and avoid reward hacking? If you fail at this and there are imperfections in the reward, how bad does this become?

2. What changes do we observe based on changes in the quality of the human feedback (e.g. getting feedback from amateurs vs experts)? This could give us information about the acceptable “difference in intelligence” between a model and its supervisor.

3. What happens when models are pushed out of distribution along a factor of variation that was not varied in the pretraining data?

4. To what extent do models provide wrong or undesired outputs in contexts where they are capable of providing the right answer?

Rohin's opinion: Measurements generally seem great. One story for impact is that we have a measurement that we think is strongly correlated with x-risk, and we use that measurement to select an AI system that scores low on such a metric. This seems distinctly good and I think would in fact reduce x-risk! But I want to clarify that I don’t think it would convince me that the system was safe with high confidence. The conceptual arguments against high confidence in safety seem quite strong and not easily overcome by such measurements. (I’m thinking of objective robustness failures (AN #66) of the form “the model is trying to pursue a simple proxy, but behaves well on the training distribution until it can execute a treacherous turn”.)

You can also tell stories where the measurements reveal empirical facts that then help us have high confidence in safety, by allowing us to build better theories and arguments, which can rule out the conceptual arguments above.

Separately, these measurements are also useful as a form of legible evidence about risk to others who are more skeptical of conceptual arguments.

 

RFP: Techniques for enhancing human feedback (Ajeya Cotra) (summarized by Rohin): Consider a topic previously analyzed in aligning narrowly superhuman models (AN #141): how can we use human feedback to train models to do what we want in cases where the models are more knowledgeable than the humans providing the feedback? A variety of techniques have been proposed to solve this problem, including iterated amplification (AN #40), debate (AN #5), recursive reward modeling (AN #34), market making (AN #108), and generalizing from short deliberations to long deliberations. This RFP solicits proposals that aim to test these or other mechanisms on existing systems. There are a variety of ways to set up the experiments so that the models are more knowledgeable than the humans providing the feedback, for example:

1. Train a language model to accurately explain things about a field that the feedback providers are not familiar with.

2. Train an RL agent to act well in an environment where the RL agent can observe more information than the feedback providers can.

3. Train a multilingual model to translate between English and a foreign language that the feedback providers do not know.

 

RFP: Interpretability (Chris Olah) (summarized by Rohin): The author provides this one sentence summary: We would like to see research building towards the ability to “reverse engineer" trained neural networks into human-understandable algorithms, enabling auditors to catch unanticipated safety problems in these models.

This RFP is primarily focused on an aspirational “intermediate” goal: to fully reverse engineer some modern neural network, such as an ImageNet classifier. (Despite the ambition, it is only an “intermediate” goal because what we would eventually need is a general method for cheaply reverse engineering any neural network.) The proposed areas of research are primarily inspired by the Circuits line of work (AN #142):

1. Discovering Features and Circuits: This is the most obvious approach to the aspirational goal. We simply “turn the crank” using existing tools to study new features and circuits, and this fairly often yields an interesting result that makes progress towards reverse engineering a neural network.

2. Scaling Circuits to Larger Models: So far the largest example of reverse engineering is curve circuits, with 50K parameters. Can we find examples of structure in the neural networks that allow us to drastically reduce the amount of effort required per parameter? (As examples, see equivariance and branch specialization.)

3. Resolving Polysemanticity: One of the core building blocks of the circuits approach is to identify a neuron with a concept, so that connections between neurons can be analyzed as connections between concepts. Unfortunately, some neurons are polysemantic, that is, they encode multiple different concepts. This greatly complicates analysis of the connections and circuits between these neurons. How can we deal with this potential obstacle?

Rohin's opinion: The full RFP has many, many more points about these topics; it’s 8 pages of remarkably information-dense yet readable prose. If you’re at all interested in mechanistic interpretability, I recommend reading it in full.

This RFP also has the benefit of having the most obvious pathway to impact: if we understand what algorithm neural networks are running, there’s a much better chance that we can catch any problems that arise, especially ones in which the neural network is deliberately optimizing against us. It’s one of the few areas where nearly everyone agrees that further progress is especially valuable.

 

RFP: Truthful and honest AI (Owain Evans) (summarized by Rohin): This RFP outlines research projects on Truthful AI (summarized below). They fall under three main categories:

1. Increasing clarity about “truthfulness” and “honesty”. While there are some tentative definitions of these concepts, there is still more precision to be had: for example, how do we deal with statements with ambiguous meanings, or ones involving figurative language? What is the appropriate standard for robustly truthful AI? It seems too strong to require the AI system to never generate a false statement; for example it might misunderstand the meaning of a newly coined piece of jargon.

2. Creating benchmarks and tasks for Truthful AI, such as TruthfulQA (AN #165), which checks for imitative falsehoods. This is not just meant to create a metric to improve on; it may also simply perform as a measurement. For example, we could experimentally evaluate whether honesty generalizes (AN #158), or explore how much truthfulness is reduced when adding in a task-specific objective.

3. Improving the truthfulness of models, for example by finetuning models on curated datasets of truthful utterances, finetuning on human feedback, using debate (AN #5), etc.

Besides the societal benefits from truthful AI, building truthful AI systems can also help with AI alignment:

1. A truthful AI system can be used to supervise its own actions, by asking it whether its selected action was good.

2. A robustly truthful AI system could continue to do this after deployment, allowing for ongoing monitoring of the AI system.

3. Similarly, we could have a robustly truthful AI system supervise its own actions in hypothetical scenarios, to make it more robustly aligned.

Rohin's opinion: While I agree that making AI systems truthful would then enable many alignment strategies, I’m actually more interested in the methods by which we make AI systems truthful. Many of the ideas suggested in the RFP are ones that would apply to alignment more generally and aren’t particularly specific to truthful AI. So it seems like whatever techniques we used to build truthful AI could then be repurposed for alignment. In other words, I expect that the benefit to AI alignment of working on truthful AI is that it serves as a good test case for methods that aim to impose constraints upon an AI system. In this sense, it is a more challenging, larger version of the ”never describe someone getting injured” challenge (AN #166). Note that I am only talking about how this helps AI alignment; there are also beneficial effects on society from pursuing truthful AI that I haven’t talked about here.

Also CEA's community building grants https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/community-building-grants 

Is the Center on Long-Term Risk still taking grant applications? Their application links to this EA Forum post which says "Please submit your application before August 12, 2019."

You can also apply for a EA web3 grant here! 

https://docs.fttdao.com/grants/apply-for-a-grant