Comments

"resulting in three publications accepted at top-tier academic ML venues (NeurIPS, ACL, ICLR),"

To add context in case people get misled by this line, the NeurIPS and ICLR papers (N2G here) were workshop papers, as far as I can tell, not main conference papers. For people not in ML, a conference like NeurIPS or ICLR has both conference papers (one of the highest status ways to publish in ML) and workshop papers (lower prestige and less selective, I'd roughly say a workshop paper is 1/3-1/2 as impressive as a conference paper).

To me, the prior is that most hackathon projects are a total flop and don't go anywhere, so helping someone convert it to a workshop paper is still impressive! (But main conference would have been very impressive). And the ACL paper was a main conference paper, which is impressive!

This seems pretty worth funding to me - it's a cheap grant, and I think this would be a cool paper to exist! I don't have a background in neuroscience or cognitive science, and I expect there's some techniques there worth my knowing about that would be useful for my work, but that much of it is irrelevant. I'd love for a paper surveying and summarising the most relevant ideas to exist! I've mentored Wes Gurnee and I trust his judgement/ability to represent the mech interp side, and expect Stephen Casper to also give good takes here. I don't know the rest of the organisers, but Wes vouches for their overall competence. I'd fund this myself if I had a regranting budget.

(I think a Nature publication is very ambitious, and would advise against bothering, but think an Arxiv publication is more than sufficient to make this worthwhile)

Lawrence is great, very experienced with alignment, and I trust his judgement, this seems like a great thing to fund! I would donate myself if this was tax deductible in the UK (which I don't think it is?)