# Two Skillsets You Need to Launch an Impactful AI Safety Project

![image.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1773863875/lexical_client_uploads/l2yfbttha9nigd7dw5gh.png)

Your project might be failing without you even knowing it.

It’s hard to save the world. If you’re launching a new AI Safety project, this sequence helps you avoid common pitfalls.

Your most likely failure modes along the way:

**You never get started.** Entrepreneurship is uncomfortable, and AI Safety is complex. There are many failure modes. It’s hard to figure out how to do something useful, so many people never try. Simultaneously, many things in AI Safety that obviously should be done are not done yet. You might mistakenly assume they’re already being done and therefore not try them.

**You move slowly, fail to gain traction, and get stuck.** You launch a tool – six months later, you have 12 users. You keep adding features, hoping something will change. Nothing does.

**You satisfice.** You figure that what you’re doing must be high impact, just because it’s part of AI Safety. In reality, you could be having 10x more impact than you are.

**You fail without realizing it.** You have users, citations, participants. But you're not actually reducing x-risk, and you don't realize it because you're not tracking your impact or not tracking the right things.

To set yourself up for success, you need two broad skillsets: entrepreneurial skills and impact-specific skills, which include impact estimation and strategic understanding of AI Safety. Mastering both skillsets is rare – we for sure know we haven’t.[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-1]

Impact = Adoption × Effectiveness
=================================

To have impact, you need to:

*   Build something (execution)
*   That people engage with (adoption)
*   In ways that create impact (effectiveness)[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-3]

Think of it roughly as: **Impact = Adoption × Effectiveness**[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-2]

You'll require competent execution to build *anything* at all. But that's not enough. You need to find *the right thing* to build. Something that leads to positive impact.

The Two Impact Multipliers
==========================

These two skillsets help you create something impactful:

**1\. Entrepreneurial skills** help you iterate toward something people actually engage with.  
**2\. Impact skills** guide you to the effectiveness that translates adoption into impact. This is tricky because you can’t directly measure whether you reduced AI x-risk until it’s too late to act on that information. Nevertheless, we’ll introduce the skills that will help you increase your odds.

Together, these help you understand the problems in AI Safety, prioritize between them, and develop solutions that work.

Most Projects Won’t Matter. Yours Could.
========================================

Your work isn’t automatically high-impact just because it’s part of AI Safety.

Impact follows something like a power law.[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-4]A small number of projects will create most of the impact.

![image.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1773863755/lexical_client_uploads/fn71zwmfpqmbxqa51av9.png)

So by default, your project will probably have little to none, or even negative, impact. But it also means your project could be one of the few making a real difference if you optimize deliberately.[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-5]

Would you help kill every single human on earth?
================================================

Of course not! You’re not a terrorist.

And yet we fear that this sequence of posts will enable you to accidentally move in that direction. There are several reasons for this:

*   Very negative and very positive AI Safety projects are pretty close together in the input space (we’ll discuss that in post 3).
*   We will tell you to bias to action, but that bias can be a really bad idea because of the Unilateralist’s Curse (we’ll discuss that in the final post).

For now, we want to leave you with a consideration about your emotions and motivated reasoning:

When *really* not wanting to do something bad makes you more likely to do that bad thing
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We know you don’t want to be responsible for the extinction of humanity, the end of nature, and everything we ever cared about. It’s so trivially true that it’s almost a silly thing to point out.

But we wonder: perhaps you *so badly don’t want* to be responsible for such terrible things that your brain won’t even allow you to entertain the possibility that, unknowingly and inadvertently, you *could* be contributing to such bad outcomes.

Perhaps then, faced with such an unfathomably scary proposition, your brain preemptively decides that your work is *good.* Without having honestly assessed it. That’s motivated reasoning.[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-6]

Basically: You *really* don’t want to destroy the world → Your brain won’t allow you to honestly assess how your work might contribute to destroying the world → You can’t make fully-informed decisions to prevent unintended outcomes → You’re more likely to be contributing to the end of the world.

One method to overcome such pre-emptive opinion-making is by using visualizations to process the emotions of a bad outcome *before* deciding whether the outcome is likely, as proposed in [Leave a Line of Retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat).

You can do this
===============

Nobody has really figured out AI Safety yet – whether that’s technical safety, governance, or fieldbuilding. That means you can get up to speed quite quickly, bring new ideas, and move the field forward. You’re not late. You can make a real change.

Funding for AI Safety nonprofits may also increase soon. Anthropic’s cofounders and a number of employees have pledged to donate large portions of their wealth, which is expected to become available at an Anthropic IPO later in 2026. Part of that money may already come available sooner due to an [ongoing pre-IPO share sale](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-kicks-off-share-sale-235828135.html?guccounter=1).[^-kjsWFw9DpX9KFBxEG-7]

Next Up: Post 2 – Entrepreneurial Skills
========================================

Many AI Safety projects fail by getting stuck. [Post 2](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaQMada2Cpo98hM4E/startup-lessons-for-ai-safety) shows you how successful entrepreneurs iterate toward adoption. Adapted to the context of AI Safety.

Already know how to build things people love? Skip to post 3 about Impact.

Edit: [Post 2](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaQMada2Cpo98hM4E/startup-lessons-for-ai-safety) is out now and the other posts will be released in the weeks to come. Add your email below to get notified when the next post comes out:

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