Thank you for the review and the positive words. We'll address your points below. Please let us know if anything remains unclear. We are more than happy to provide more details.
I don't understand why other people haven't funded this yet
Apart has, for much of 2023, been a very small team (2 FTE) fully focused on experimenting with and improving the research sprints and lab fellowship. We simply did not have the capacity to scale up the program and the corresponding fundraising so far. Now, with an additional leadership team member and two half-time assistants on board (4 FTE), we finally have the capacity to tackle scaling up and funding seriously.
Maybe this application is exaggerating stuff?
We have been quite careful not to overstate our case in this proposal and needless to say, all numbers presented are correct. Let us know if you need any more details or evidence.
Maybe the organization adds another step in the chain to impact, and it would be more efficient to fund individual people instead?
We think that a peer-reviewed publication (particularly a first-author publication) is close to a necessity for most research careers and that aspiring AI safety researchers are much less likely to achieve this on the same swift time scale without the right structure and guidance.
Another added benefit of funding us versus funding individual people directly is that, by directly interacting with a very large number of individuals through our research sprints, we can identify and carefully select talented people who would not be obvious targets for other funders, and thereby uncover talent that would otherwise be overlooked.
Maybe the biggest one: how do I know the success is counterfactual? Say that someone participated in a hackathon/fellowship/etc, and then later got a research position in some Oxford lab. How do I know that the person wouldn't have gotten something similarly impressive in the absence of your organization?
As mentioned above, we believe that (a) having a paper (especially as first author) accepted/submitted for peer-reviewed AI safety publication will often be critical to our target demographic's career trajectory and (b) the people we support are less likely to convert a hackathon project into a paper worthy of submission/acceptance at a top venue without our support. Evidence for (a) comes from our fellows in interview processes who report that most of their time in interviews have been discussions on their Apart Lab research project (with one interviewer remarking it as "a strong part of [the] resume" to go through the program). Evidence for (b) is harder to come by but self-reports of our fellows suggest that they believe they could not have achieved a similar output without the help of Apart Lab.