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Byrel Mitchell's avatar

To be honest, I'm relieved that you and the other recommenders all found too few good places to put money for the ultra-long-term. Almost all such charities I've seen smell. It's a daunting scale to optimize for, and concrete proposals seem few and far between. There's no way to show that 'raising awareness' and 'investigating possibilities' and whatnot are actually productive in any way, and so I generally assume they're not. On the other hand, most of the organizations you mention by name are new to me, so I'm clearly uninformed about a lot here.

The one particularly that interested me was ALLFED though. Preparation for life after apocalypse seems like an underexplored X-risk approach; it allows for your research time to be helpful in mitigating many different X-risks as well as being helpful in major non-existential crises (like nuclear war or an out-sized solar flare burning out much of what's connected to electric lines.) I'm looking forward to doing some research on them.

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SE Gyges's avatar

In the spirit of this sort of thing: Is there any meaningful grant-giving for red teaming, currently?

Concretely: If the authors of "Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models" were inclined to pioneer further attacks on LLMs, as a method of demonstrating that they are fundamentally unsafe in as many situations as possible, to whom would they apply for grants, and would those grants be likely to issue? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the authors will in the alternative of getting such a grant do something completely different or non-technical.

One expects that (of course) someone could make more money in private industry than they could from grants. To have an incentive to go to private industry instead of producing useful research is different from having no financial incentive for producing useful research.

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