Announcing our $160M grant from Coefficient Giving
We are excited to announce that Resolution has a $160M grant from Coefficient Giving (cG) to put rigorous alignment research on a (closer to) even footing with the frontier labs. We will use it to accelerate progress towards higher-confidence alignment, or to find evidence and obstacles showing why alignment is hard.
The grant is structured as a $108M base plus $52M conditional on a combination of hiring success and compute needs. The base includes a small regranting budget, which we plan to use both for high-quality non-Resolution alignment research and to give back to shared community infrastructure that we depend on. Coefficient Giving will be our sole funder to start (thank you!); our goal is to raise larger-scale funds from a mixture of sources once we demonstrate success with semiautomated alignment theory and empirics.
The time for ambitious alignment funding is now
In our launch announcement, we argued that the time to automate alignment is now: frontier systems have finally reached the threshold where they can make nontrivial theoretical progress, and theoretical research has access to more sources of ground truth than empirical metric climbing.
There is a second, structural reason to be more ambitious now: the AI safety funding ecosystem is scaling up. The community has long been hampered by the enormous difference in capital between the nonprofit ecosystem and the for-profit frontier labs. This is starting to change. Coefficient Giving has led the pack, and they can now move at significant speed and scale: the entire process from our initial conversation to grant confirmation took six weeks.
They may soon be joined by an enormous influx of philanthropic capital via the OpenAI Foundation and following the Anthropic IPO. The combination of Coefficient Giving and the possibility of a third wave of American philanthropy raises a challenge for the broader nonprofit AI safety ecosystem: how to turn additional capital into safety progress.
Please join us in speeding up higher-confidence alignment!
There is a lot of relevant theory and rigorous empirical research happening now across the community, at academic speed or in small nonprofits. The problem is that the AI developers are building the dangerous object (artificial superintelligence) very fast, using tighter feedback loops and more resources. We believe that superintelligence might arrive soon as a result, potentially in the next few years. This is bad!
We want to make the race between rigor and danger a fair(er) fight. Great research will continue to happen in academia and smaller nonprofits, but we believe we can build the fast, tight-feedback version of semiautomated alignment theory and rigorous empirics as well, using the same ingredients:
- A critical mass of world-class researchers across a portfolio of interacting research areas, working together as high-communication-bandwidth teams
- A bunch of compute resources, both tokens for semiautomated reasoning and GPUs for low and medium-scale empirics (no large training runs!)
This includes paying well! Our compensation sits well above nonprofit and academic norms, though we won't match frontier-lab equity.
Join us in closing the gap
We are hiring! We are rapidly growing our team and looking to fill a range of both technical and non-technical positions.
If you are a theorist who agrees with the need to move quickly on alignment, apply to our research scientist positions. If you are an empiricist or engineer who agrees with the need for more rigor, apply to our research scientist or research engineer positions. If you are an operator who wants to help build Resolution into an effective organization for turning human creativity and compute into alignment progress, please apply to our operations positions!
Check out all of our open roles on our website. If you have any questions, please reach out!
We will grow more! Down the road, we expect we'll need to grow even further in compute and/or humans, necessitating additional funding. Aligning ASI is the project of our time. It will require the best effort our civilization can muster. If you want to find out how you can help, please reach out!