Corrigibility Prizes for Existing Work

One of my goals for the Corrigibility Research Fund is to retroactively encourage high-quality research on AI alignment (and corrigibility in particular) by awarding prizes. Back in July, I got my feet wet as a fund manager by handing out $27,000 to reward existing work and build interest in the fund. Now, I'd like to disburse an additional $48,000 and use the opportunity to publicly highlight and celebrate the work of the prizewinners from both rounds: about two dozen researchers scattered across roughly a dozen teams. If the fund continues to be supported in future years, my hope is for prizes like these to become regular, predictable, and large, such that many researchers, year after year, are motivated to aim for them. The awards that I'm announcing here are more ad-hoc than I'd like, and represent only my single perspective trying to balance a wide range of desiderata. Don't take the specific size of each prize purse too seriously. It's all high-quality work. If anyone has ideas for how to improve the retroactive funding process for this kind of scientific work, please leave a comment! (And as always, if you know of work that I should be aware of, please email me at grants@corrigibilityresearch.org. I'm hoping to disburse more than $60k in prize funding this December, in addition to the various micro-grants that I'll be awarding on Lightcone Commons to corrigibility projects.) Before getting into the winners, I'd like to mention that even though my aim for these prizes was to reward existing work, I wanted to focus on work from this year or the last few years. As such, I chose not to award prizes to some of the most important thinkers in the corrigibility sub-field. While they are more than worthy of praise, I felt that, given the modest level of funding available, it was better to focus on scientists who hadn't already "made it" in some real sense, and researchers who were clearly actively working on the topic.[1] Those who I deliberately passed over, desp