Harlan Stewart and Katja Grace*, 22 December, 2022
Information
New Hires and function modifications
In 2022, the AI Impacts staff has grown from two to seven full time employees. Out of greater than 250 candidates, we employed Elizabeth Santos as Operations Lead, Harlan Stewart as Analysis Assistant, and three Analysis Analysts: Zach Stein-Perlman, Aysja Johnson, and (are within the strategy of hiring) Jeffrey Heninger. We’re excited to have all of them, and you may study extra about them on our about web page.
Rick and Katja have traded some tasks: Rick is now Director of AI Impacts, and Katja is Lead Researcher. This implies Rick is mostly in control of making selections about working the org, although Katja has veto energy. Katja is accountable for doing analysis, in addition to directing and overseeing it.
Summer season Internship Program
We ran an internship program through the summer season. Between Could and September, six interns labored on numerous analysis initiatives on matters similar to worldwide coordination, explanations of historic human success, case research in danger mitigation, R&D funding in AI, our new survey of Machine Studying researchers, present AI capabilities, applied sciences which might be strategically-relevant to AI, and the size of machine studying fashions.
AI Impacts Wiki
We intend to interchange our pages with an AI Impacts Wiki. Our pages have all the time been functionally one thing like a wiki, so hopefully this new format will make it clearer learn how to work together with them (as distinct from our weblog posts), in addition to simpler to navigate for readers and simpler to replace for researchers. The AI Impacts Wiki will launch quickly and could be previewed right here. . We’ll say extra about different minor modifications after we launch it, however AI Impacts’ previous and future public analysis shall be both detailed on the wiki or findable by way of the wiki. You possibly can tell us what you assume utilizing our suggestions type in addition to feedback on this weblog submit.
Analysis
Completed this 12 months
This 12 months, our important new pages and research-heavy weblog posts are:
AI Impacts is largely a set of pages which might be supposed to get up to date over time, so our analysis mustn’t essentially present up as new pages, and is mostly a bit tougher to measure than in additional normal analysis establishments. On this event, the above pages and posts most likely characterize most of our completed analysis output this 12 months.
In progress
Issues persons are engaged on currently:
- Noteworthy capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art AI (Zach, Harlan)
- A case examine of Alexander Fleming’s efforts to warn the world about antibiotic resistance (Harlan)
- A literature overview of notable cognitive talents of ants (Aysja)
- Evaluation and evaluation of AI forecasting strategies (Zach)
- Case research of actors deciding to not pursue applied sciences, regardless of obvious incentives to take action. (Jeffrey, Aysja)
- Strategically important slender AI capabilities (Zach)
- The implications of the fermi paradox and anthropics for AI (Zach)
- What proof from computational irreducibility says about the place highly effective AI shouldn’t be in a position to strongly outperform people (Jeffrey, Aysja)
- Proof about how uniform the mind’s cortex is (Aysja)
- Minor additions to Discontinuous Progress Investigation, a mission searching for historic examples of discontinuous progress in technological tendencies
- Arguments for AI being an existential danger (Katja)
- An paper in regards to the survey (Zach)
- Ending up of varied summer season internship initiatives talked about earlier (interns)
- (Most likely another issues)
Funding
Thanks to our latest funders! Together with Jaan Tallinn, who simply gave us a $546k grant by way of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and Open Philanthropy who supported us for 3 months not too long ago with a grant of of $364,893.
We anticipated to obtain a grant from the FTX Future Fund to cowl working the 2022 Professional Survey on Progress in AI, however didn’t obtain the cash as a result of FTX’s collapse. If anybody needs the funders’ share of ethical credit score for paying our survey contributors specifically, at a value of round $30k for the entire thing, please get in contact! (The ex-Future Fund staff nonetheless deserves credit score for substantial encouragement in making the survey occur—thanks to them!)
Request for extra funding
We’d like to be funded extra!
We at present have round $662k. That is about 5-8 months of runway relying on our frugality (spending more cash may appear to be e.g. an extra researcher, a 2023 internship program, freer budgets for journey and coaching and so on, setting salaries extra apt to the job market). We’re searching for one other $395k-$895k to cowl 2023, and would additionally ideally like to increase our runway.
Should you may be on this, and wish to hear extra about why we expect our work is vital sufficient to fund, Katja’s weblog submit, Why work at AI Impacts? outlines a few of our causes. If you wish to speak to us about why we must be funded or hear extra particulars about what we’d do with cash, please write to Elizabeth, Rick or Katja at [firstname]@aiimpacts.org.
Should you’d prefer to donate to AI Impacts, you are able to do so right here. (And we thanks!)
*Harlan did a lot of the work, Katja put it up with out Harlan seeing its last state, so is accountable for any errors.