Case for Funding AI Safety in Japan

According to a post on LessWrong, Japan's AI safety research community faces a funding gap of roughly two point one million dollars, yet researchers there can be hired at one point eight to two point three times cheaper than in the United States. Esa Koskinen, a volunteer director at AI Safety Tokyo, spent about a hundred hours investigating the situation and found that multiple organizations working on technical research, governance, and education currently run almost entirely on volunteers. Despite the capacity to employ some thirty-five researchers and ten staff members next year, the organizations lack the budget to do so. The barrier isn't talent or opportunity—Japan has hosted eighty AI safety events in the past year—but rather high friction in the grant-writing process, whether from the time commitment required or lack of awareness about available funding sources.

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