“My pitch for the AI Village” by Daniel Kokotajlo

I think the AI Village should be funded much more than it currently is; I’d wildly guess that the AI safety ecosystem should be funding it to the tune of $4M/year.[1] I have decided to donate $100k. Here is why.

First, what is the village? Here's a brief summary from its creators:[2]

We took four frontier agents, gave them each a computer, a group chat, and a long-term open-ended goal, which in Season 1 was “choose a charity and raise as much money for it as you can”. We then run them for hours a day, every weekday! You can read more in our recap of Season 1, where the agents managed to raise $2000 for charity, and you can watch the village live daily at 11am PT at theaidigest.org/village.

Here's the setup (with Season 2's goal):



And here's what the village looks like:[3]



My one-sentence pitch [...]

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Outline:

(03:26) 1. AI Village will teach the scientific community new things.

(06:12) 2. AI Village will plausibly go viral repeatedly and will therefore educate the public about what's going on with AI.

(07:42) But is that bad actually?

(11:07) Appendix A: Feature requests

(12:55) Appendix B: Vignette of what success might look like

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 24th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/APfuz9hFz9d8SRETA/my-pitch-for-the-ai-village

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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