Rob Wiblin

And I think I have sympathy for that.

Hopefully I represented that perspective reasonably well, but I just feel like in my life, in my experience, like having done the homework, like really qualitatively changes like

the details of the decisions you make in ways that I think can be really high impact.

Like one thing that I'm able to do having like gone through the whole rigmarole of like forming views is

work with researchers to find like the most awesome version of like their idea by the lights of my goals and like pitch them on that and like sort of co-create grant opportunities.

And I think there's just like something that I maybe won't be like great at defending, but I just feel like there are other like nebulous benefits beyond that.

And I like really like operating that way.

Late 2023, yeah.

Or just in tension with, in the short term, making a large volume of grants.

So I think I ended up pursuing a compromise where one thing that just comes with the territory of this role is that there have been grantees that we made grants to in the past that are up for renewal.

And part of the responsibility of being the person in charge of this program area is that you investigate those renewals and make decisions about whether we should keep the grantees on or not.

And those grants, I tried to...

follow like what an OpenPhil canonical decision making process would be there.

And so I tried to pursue kind of a barbell strategy for a while where like on the one hand, there were either renewals or people who like knew us, who reached out to us to ask us to consider grants, where I wouldn't hold myself to the standard of like really

on the technical merits, like understanding and defending the proposal, but would lean more on heuristics like, this person seems aligned with the goal of reducing AI takeover risk, this person has a broadly good research track record, and so on, and try to make those grants relatively quickly.

But then I would also be trying to develop a different funding program or some grants that I really wanted to bet on where I would try and hold myself to that standard and try and really write down why I thought this was a good thing to pursue.

And it turned out that the second thing basically turned into making a bet in late 23 to mid 24 of AI agent capability benchmarks and other ways of gaining evidence about AI's impact on the world.

Yeah, yeah.

So I launched this request for proposals, which OpenPhil has done technical safety requests for proposals before, but this was by far the narrowest and most sort of like deeply justified technical RFP that we had put out at that time, where I was like,

We are looking for benchmarks that test agents, not just models that are chatbots.