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Announcing the Future Fund's AI Worldview Prize

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2022·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W7C5hwq7sjdpTdrQF/annou...

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Nick_Beckstead·leopold·William_MacAskill·ketanrama·ab

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3/5
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Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.

Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum

Launched by the FTX Future Fund in 2022 before FTX's collapse, this prize competition sought to crowdsource diverse arguments about AI risk worldviews; its historical significance lies in illustrating how EA-aligned funders attempted to stress-test AI safety assumptions.

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Importance: 42/100news

Summary

The FTX Future Fund announced a prize competition inviting researchers and thinkers to write essays arguing for or against specific AI risk-related worldviews, aiming to surface diverse perspectives on AI trajectories and existential risk. The competition offered substantial cash prizes to incentivize high-quality engagement with contested empirical and normative questions about AI development. It reflected the Future Fund's effort to stress-test and refine their own assumptions about AI safety priorities.

Key Points

  • •The Future Fund offered prizes for compelling essays arguing for or against specific AI-related worldviews, including optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.
  • •The competition was designed to surface underrepresented perspectives and challenge the Future Fund's existing beliefs about AI risk and trajectories.
  • •Prize categories covered topics like whether transformative AI will arrive soon, whether it will be catastrophic, and whether current safety approaches are adequate.
  • •The initiative was part of the broader FTX Future Fund grantmaking strategy, which collapsed after FTX's bankruptcy in late 2022.
  • •The contest represents an example of using financial incentives to generate intellectual diversity in AI risk discourse.

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# Announcing the Future Fund's AI Worldview Prize
By Nick_Beckstead, leopold, William_MacAskill, ketanrama, ab
Published: 2022-09-23
*Update:* *I, Nick Beckstead, no longer work at the Future Fund am writing this update purely in a personal capacity. Since the *[*Future Fund team has resigned*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1?commentId=YNH2Gj35cueyT35tp#YNH2Gj35cueyT35tp) *and FTX has*[*filed for bankruptcy*](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/business/ftx-bankruptcy.html)*, it now seems very unlikely that these prizes will be paid out. I'm very sad about the disruption that this may cause to contest participants.*

  
*I would encourage participants who were working on entries for this prize competition to save their work and submit it to *[*Open Philanthropy's own AI Worldview Contest in 2023*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3kaojgsu6qy2n8TdC/pre-announcing-the-2023-open-philanthropy-ai-worldviews)*.*

Today we are announcing a competition with prizes ranging from $15k to $1.5M for work that informs the Future Fund's fundamental assumptions about the future of AI, or is informative to a panel of [superforecaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster) judges selected by [Good Judgment Inc](https://goodjudgment.com/). These prizes will be open for three months—until Dec 23—after which we may change or discontinue them at our discretion. We have two reasons for launching these prizes.

First, we hope to expose our assumptions about the future of AI to intense external scrutiny and improve them. We think artificial intelligence (AI) is the development most likely to dramatically alter the trajectory of humanity this century, and it is consequently one of our top funding priorities. Yet our philanthropic interest in AI is fundamentally dependent on a number of very difficult judgment calls, which we think have been inadequately scrutinized by others. 

As a result, we think it's really possible that:

*   all of this AI stuff is a misguided sideshow,
*   we should be even more focused on AI, or
*   a bunch of this AI stuff is basically right, but we should be focusing on entirely different aspects of the problem.

If any of those three options is right—and we strongly suspect at least one of them is—we want to learn about it as quickly as possible because it would change how we allocate hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) and help us better serve our mission of improving humanity's longterm prospects.

Second, we are aiming to do [bold and decisive tests](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2mx6xrDrwiEKzfgks/announcing-the-future-fund-1#Our_2022_plans) of prize-based philanthropy, as part of our more general aim of testing highly scalable approaches to funding. We think these prizes contribute to that work. If these prizes work, it will be a large update in favor of this approach being capable of surfacing valuable knowledge that could affect our prio

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