plus updates on what Manifund has been up to
What do I mean by “homegrown”? These projects are:
If you’re a small donor or earn to give, consider giving to projects like these:
By Michael Trazzi — $16k raised of $55k
Michael has already recorded interviews with the main characters of SB 1047: sponsors like Scott Wiener and Dan Hendrycks, proponents like Zvi and Holly Elmore, and opponents like Dean Ball and Timothy B Lee. Now he needs the funding to turn it into a 1-hour feature documentary. This is a rare chance to sponsor a high-quality video narrative, and share it beyond our existing ecosystem. I’ve personally donated $10k towards this, and expect Michael to be able to effectively use much more.
By Gavin Leech — $8k of $17.6k raised
Gavin Leech is a forecaster, researcher and founder of Arb; he’s proposing to re-rerun a 2023 survey of the AI Safety landscape. The landscape shifts pretty quickly, so I’d love to see what’s changed since last year.
As I was writing this, regrantor Neel Nanda funded it to the minimum $8k ask! Neel adds:
I think collections like this add significant value to newcomers to the field, mostly by being a list of all areas worth maybe thinking about, and key links (rather than eg by providing a lot of takes on which areas are more or less important, unless the author has excellent taste). Gavin has convinced me that the previous post gets enough traffic for it be valuable to be kept up to date.