“How cost-effective are AI safety YouTubers?” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸, Austin

Sep 14, 2025

17:32

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Early work on ”GiveWell for AI Safety”

Intro

EA was founded on the principle of cost-effectiveness. We should fund projects that do more with less, and more generally, spend resources as efficiently as possible. And yet, while much interest, funding, and resources in EA have shifted towards AI safety, it's rare to see any cost-effectiveness calculations. The focus on AI safety is based on vague philosophical arguments that the future could be very large and valuable, and thus whatever is done towards this end is worth orders of magnitude more than most short-term effects.

Even if AI safety is the most important problem, you should still strive to optimize how resources are spent to achieve maximum impact, since there are limited resources.

Global health organizations and animal welfare organizations work hard to measure cost-effectiveness, evaluate charities, make sure effects are counterfactual, run RCTs, estimate moral weights, scope out interventions [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Early work on GiveWell for AI Safety

(00:16) Intro

(02:43) Step 1: Gathering data

(03:00) Viewer minutes

(03:35) Costs and revenue

(04:49) Results

(05:08) Step 2: Quality-adjusting

(05:40) Quality of Audience (Qa)

(06:58) Fidelity of Message (Qf)

(08:05) Alignment of Message (Qm)