EA - Manifund: What we're funding (weeks 2-4) by Austin

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Manifund: What we're funding (weeks 2-4), published by Austin on August 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Overall reflectionsVery happy with the volume and quality of grants we've been making$600k+ newly committed across 12 projectsRegrantors have been initiating grants and coordinating on large projectsIndependent donors have committed $35k+ of their own money!We plan to start fundraising soon, based on this pace of distributionHappy to be coordinating with funders at LTFF, Lightspeed, Nonlinear and OpenPhilWe now have a common Slack channel to share knowledge and plansCurrently floating the idea of setting up a common app between us.Happy with our experimentation! Some things we've been trying:Equity investments, loans, dominant assurance contracts and retroactive fundingGrantathon, office hours, feedback on Discord & site commentsLess happy with our operations (wrt feedback and response times to applicants)Taking longer to support to individual grantees, or start new Manifund initiativesPlease ping us if it's been a week and you haven't heard anything!Wise deactivated our account, making international payments more difficult/expensive.In cases where multiple regrantors may fund a project, we've observed a bit of "funding chicken"Grant of the month[$310k] Apollo ResearchThis is our largest grant to date! Many of our regrantors were independently excited about Apollo; in the end, we coordinated between Tristan Hume, Evan Hubinger and Marcus Abramovitch to fund this.From Tristan:I'm very excited about Apollo based on a combination of the track record of it's founding employees and the research agenda they've articulated.Marius and Lee have published work that's significantly contributed to Anthropic's work on dictionary learning. I've also met both Marius and Lee and have confidence in them to do a good job with Apollo.Additionally, I'm very much a fan of alignment and dangerous capability evals as an area of research and think there's lots of room for more people to work on them.In terms of cost-effectiveness I like these research areas because they're ones I think are very tractable to approach from outside a major lab in a helpful way, while not taking large amounts of compute. I also think Apollo existing in London will allow them to hire underutilized talent that would have trouble getting a U.S. visa.New grants[$112k] Jesse Hoogland: Scoping Developmental InterpretabilityJesse posted this through our open call:We propose a 6-month research project to assess the viability of Developmental Interpretability, a new AI alignment research agenda. "DevInterp" studies how phase transitions give rise to computational structure in neural networks, and offers a possible path to scalable interpretability tools.Though we have both empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that phase transitions dominate the training process, the details remain unclear. We plan to clarify the role of phase transitions by studying them in a variety of models combining techniques from Singular Learning Theory and Mechanistic Interpretability. In six months, we expect to have gathered enough evidence to confirm that DevInterp is a viable research program.If successful, we expect Developmental Interpretability to become one of the main branches of technical alignment research over the next few years.Rachel was excited about this project and considered setting up a dominance assurance contract to encourage regrants, but instead offered 10% matching; Evan took her up on this![$60k] Dam and Pietro: Writeup on Agency and (Dis)EmpowermentA regrant initiated by Evan:6 months support for two people, Damiano and Pietro, to write a paper about (dis)empowerment. Its ultimate aim is to offer formal and operational notions of (dis)empowerment. For example, an inte...