Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)

Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research) — EA Forum 
 
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 by Sam Holton Jan 23 2024 13 min read 23 87

 Cause prioritization AI safety Forecasting AI Safety Camp Arb Building the field of AI safety Impact assessment Frontpage Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research) Summary Approach Data collected Impact assessment: new researcher production Assumptions Potential Issues Estimating the rate of new researcher production Dollar cost per new researcher produced by AISC Typical AIS researchers produced by AISC Dollar cost per new researcher produced by other means Counterfactual analysis Other impacts of AISC Research outputs from AISC and follow-on research Network effects producing further AIS and non-AIS research AISC leading to future positions Other data Fraction that pursue AIS In-camp experiences: summary of positive and negative experience Conclusion Our all-things-considered assessment Areas for further research Appendix: Details on our approach A model for the productivity of a research field AISC’s impacts on the productivity of the AI Safety field AISC’s other impacts on AIS Note on the difficulty of assessing research quality 22 comments Authors: Sam Holton, Misha Yagudin  

 Data collection: David Mathers, Patricia Lim 

 Note: Arb Research was commissioned to produce this impact assessment by the AISC organizers. 

 [EDIT] Conflict of interest: Arb's directors, Misha and Gavin, are AISC alumni and have friends in the community. Sam's investigation was independent, but Misha, Gavin, and the current AISC organizers Linda and Remmelt were invited to comment on the report before publishing. 

 Summary

 AI Safety Camp (AISC) connects people interested in AI safety (AIS) to a research mentor, forming project teams that last for a few weeks and go on to write up their findings. To assess the impact of AISC, we first consider how the organization might increase the productivity of the Safety field as a whole. Given its short duration and focus on introducing new people to AIS, we conclude that AISC’s largest contribution is in producing new AIS researchers that otherwise wouldn’t have joined the field. 

 We gather survey data and track participants in order to estimate how many researchers AISC has produced, finding that 5–10% of participants plausibly become AIS researchers (see “Typical AIS researchers produced by AISC” for examples) that otherwise would not have joined the field. AISC spends roughly $12–30K per researcher. We could not find estimates for counterfactual researcher production in similar programs such as (SERI) MATS. However, we used the LTFF grants database to estimate that the cost of researcher upskilling in AI safety for 1 year is $53K. Even assuming all researchers with this amount of training

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