Virtual AI Safety Unconference

	Donor	Amount	Contribution
1	Darryl Wright	$150	27%
2	Aleksandr Popov	$100	24%
3	David Manheim	$100	20%
4	Dawn Drescher	$50	11%
5	Roland Pihlakas	$60	10%
6	Orpheus Lummis	$40	9%

Virtual AI Safety Unconference (VAISU) is an online event for both established and aspiring AI safety researchers. The event is a space for you to have productive research discussions around the question: “How do we make sure that AI systems will be safe and beneficial, both in the near term and in the long run?” This includes, but is not limited to: alignment, corrigibility, interpretability, cooperativeness, understanding humans and human value structures, AI governance, and strategy.

The event is funded by a “pay what you want” model. I.e. we’re asking people who attended to donate a voluntary amount, if they like the event. But anyone is well come to contribute.

This money raised for VAISU will be used to pay for reimbursing software expenses and retrospectively paying the main organisers (Nguyên and Linda) for their time organising this event.
If we get 10.000 USD in donations for this event, then we promise to run another one within 1 year, and possibly sooner.
If we get less than 10.000 USD we might still run more of these events, but no promises. How much money we get is also an important signal for how much work we should put into any future VAISUs.
Any surplus over 10.000 USD will be saved for the next VAISU.

The majority of the costs for running VAISU is organisers time. Both main organisers (Nguyên and Linda) are doing a mix of paid and unpaid work in and around AI safety. We’re hoping that VAISU will fall into the paid work category. We been organising this event without any funding, in the hopes that we’ll be able to pay ourselves retroactively. However, you are under no obligation to provide this funding. We decided to run this event knowing that we may or may not get paid, and we take full responsibility for this gamble.

The reason why we are asking for 10.000 USD is because this is the amount necessary to make this event a priority. It’s possible to run an event like this for much less, but only if it happens to fit in neatly between other paid work, which we can’t guarantee.