Rob Wiblin

have more of like a story for like, and this line of research is addressing this critical problem.

And like, you know, this is like why we think it's plausibly likely to succeed.

And this is what it would mean if it succeeded.

And we never really like had that kind of like very built out strategy because it's like very hard.

It's a lot to invest in building out a strategy like that.

But, you know, having been thrown headfirst into grantmaking with the FTX crisis, I was like, maybe I do want to try and take on the AI safety grantmaking portfolio, which at the time didn't have a leader because all the people who had worked on that portfolio had left by that point.

Some to go to FTX Foundation, actually.

Okay.

And so it was this portfolio that had been somewhat orphaned within the organization, and it was clearly a very important thing.

And I was like, oh, maybe we could approach it in this kind of novel way for us in this area to really try and form our own inside views about the priorities of different technical research directions and really connect how it would address the problems we most cared about.

Yeah, or like I think it's a bit nebulous what the standard is that I hold myself to.

But I think for my research projects, when I think about timelines or I think about how AI could lead to takeover or like how quickly could the world change if we had AGI, I think I can often with like months of effort get to the point where I can say,

anticipate and have a reasonable response to and a reasonable back and forth with a very wide range of intelligent criticisms for why my conclusion might be totally wrong and totally off base.

I feel like I know what the skeptics that are more doomy than me will say, and I know what the skeptics that are less doomy than me will say, and I could have an intelligent conversation that goes for a long while with either side.

And that is a standard I aspired to get to with why we supported certain grants.

And I could do that with some of our grants, but I wanted the program to get to the point where if somebody came to me and said, isn't interpretability just actually hasn't seen much success over the last four years?

What do you make of that?

I wanted to have...

I wanted to kind of be at reflective equilibrium on my answers to questions like that and wanted to be able to say something that went a bit beyond like, yes, but outside view, we should support a range of things.

And that is something that I think emotionally is unsatisfying to me if it's a big element of my work.