TLDR

We are announcing a $20k bounty for publicly-understandable explainers of AI safety concepts. We are also releasing the results of the AI Safety Arguments competition.

Background

Of the technologists, ML researchers, and policymakers thinking about AI, very few are seriously thinking about AI existential safety. This results in less high-quality research and could also pose difficulties for deployment of safety solutions in the future.

There is no single solution to this problem. However, an increase in the number of publicly accessible discussions of AI risk can help to shift the Overton window towards more serious consideration of AI safety.

Capability advancements have surprised many in the broader ML community: as they have made discussion of AGI more possible, they can also contribute to making discussion of existential safety more possible. Still, there are not many good introductory resources to the topic or various subtopics. If somebody has no background, they might need to read books or very long sequences of posts to get an idea about why people are worried about AI x-risk. There are a few strong, short, introductions to AI x-risk, but some of them are out of date and they aren’t suited for all audiences.

Shane Legg, a co-founder of DeepMind, recently said the following about AGI:^[1]

If you go back 10-12 years ago the whole notion of Artificial General Intelligence was lunatic fringe. People [in the field] would literally just roll their eyes and just walk away. [I had that happen] multiple times. [...] [But] every year [the number of people who roll their eyes] becomes less.

We hope that the number of people rolling their eyes at AI safety can be reduced, too. In the case of AGI, increased AI capabilities and public relations efforts by major AI labs have fed more discussion. Similarly, conscious efforts to increase public understanding and knowledge of safety could have a similar effect.

Bounty details

The Center for AI Safety is announcing a $20,000 bounty for the best publicly-understandable explainers of topics in AI safety. Winners of the bounty will win $2,000 each, for a total of up to ten possible bounty recipients. The bounty is subject to the Terms and Conditions below.

By publicly understandable, we mean understandable to somebody who has never read a book or technical paper on AI safety and who has never read LessWrong or the...

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