Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)

# Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)
By Sam Holton
Published: 2024-01-23
*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
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[AI Safety Camp](https://aisafety.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 become safety researchers that wouldn’t otherwise have joined the field, AISC still recruits new researchers at a similar or lower cost (though note that training programs at different stages of a career pipeline are complements).

We then consider the relevant counterfactuals for a nonprofit organization interested in supporting AIS researchers and tentatively conclude that funding the creation of new researchers in this way is slightly more impactful than funding a typical AIS project. However, this conclusion is highly dependent on one’s particular views about AI safety and could also change based on an assessment of the quality of researchers produced by AISC.

We also review what other impacts AISC has in terms of producing publications and helping participants get a position in AIS organizations.

Approach
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To assess impact, we focus on AISC’s rate of net-new researcher production. We believe this is the largest contribution of the camp given their focus on introducing researchers to the field and given the short duration of projects. In the appendix, we justify this and explain why new researcher production is one of the most important contributions to the productivity of a research field. For completeness, we also attempt to quantify o

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