Rob Wiblin

And they would be working on, you know, often interpretability or some kind of adversarial robustness.

And they seemed like, you know, reasonable research bets.

But I felt kind of unsatisfied.

And I think this is going to be like a theme of like me and my career.

I felt kind of unsatisfied about how.

the theory of change hadn't been really ground out and spelled out as to how this type of interpretability research would lead to this type of technique or ability we have, and then that could fit into a plan to prevent AI takeover in this way, or similarly for any of the other research streams we were funding.

And this had been actually the big thing that

deterred me from like getting involved in OpenPhil's technical AI safety grant making for a long time, even though I was one of the few people on staff that thought about technical AI safety outside of that team.

It was because like in the end, it seemed like most grant decisions in this 2015 to 2022 period turned on like heuristics about this person's a cool researcher and they care about AI safety, which is like totally reasonable.

But I think I wanted to like

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.