Rob Wiblin

It was, like you would expect, a lot of effort poured into, like, one sort of direction.

And, you know, if you were skeptical of this, like, sort of high effort sort of approach to grantmaking, there would be this, like...

You could argue that I could have just put in way less effort, funded twice as much volume in grants across 10 different areas, picking up the low-hanging fruit in all those areas.

Yeah, I think throughout this, so right around when I switched from doing mostly research to doing grant making, and especially when I was trying to ramp up this program area that had this more inside view, more understanding-oriented approach to AI safety research, Holden, who had been running the...

The AI team up to that point decided to step away and left the organization and he was my manager.

And I think that I had a working relationship with Holden that involved a lot of like arguing and discussing about the like substance of what I was working on.

And when he left, leadership was stretched more thin because someone in leadership was gone.

And I think the people who remained in the leadership team didn't have as much context and fluency with all this AI stuff as Holden did.

So I wrote up this big memo being like, oh, we should do AI safety grant making in a more understanding-oriented way, and we should develop inside views, and here's why I think that would be good.

And I think what I wanted was,

was for like my manager or like leadership to like argue with me about the object level on that and like for for there to be like some sort of like shared view within the organization about like how much this was a good idea or like what are the pros and cons of it and like how much we want to bet on it but I think that was like just kind of unrealistic given the other priorities on their plate and like given their level of like context in this area so I ended up having to

to sort of approach it in a more like transactional way with the organization.

It's more like, rather than like, let's talk about whether this is a good idea.

It was more like, well, I want to do it this way.

And they were like, yeah, I mean, we don't know if that's the best way to do things.

And like, we have some skepticism, but like, you can, you can do that if you want.

And it's like, yeah,

And so I felt like kind of lonely because I think and this is something I learned about myself, like over the course of trying to run this program and then going on sabbatical and reflecting on it that I really like to be like kind of plugged into the like central brain of like the organization I'm part of.

And I sort of.

I didn't feel like I had a path to do that.