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 [...]

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Outline:

(01:58) Impact = Adoption × Effectiveness

(02:31) The Two Impact Multipliers

(03:09) Most Projects Wont Matter. Yours Could.

(03:48) Would you help kill every single human on earth?

(04:28) When really not wanting to do something bad makes you more likely to do that bad thing

(05:44) You can do this

(06:26) Next Up: Post 2 - Entrepreneurial Skills

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 18th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jDDZsoGRK8HNZEoTb/two-skillsets-you-need-to-launch-an-impactful-ai-safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Comic strip showing AI alignment project causing unintended consequences.

Bar chart showing Impact on Existential Risk across projects, from negative to highly positive impact.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Two Skillsets You Need to Launch an Impactful AI Safety Project” by Luc Brinkman, plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma)