I think people adjacent to the field don't appreciate how small AI safety is. For example, sometimes people complain about how AI safety threat models don't seem as well-developed or rigorous as climate change models. I think some of this is a skill issue on the part of AI safety researchers and advocates, which I complained about elsewhere (see reply). However, by far the bigger issue is that there is just way more money and people going into addressing climate change than on AI safety. There are tens of millions of people working on reducing climate change, and the core of people working on threat models ("climate scientists") number in the tens of thousands. (Yes, I was surprised by how big the numbers were too). (Most people work on stuff like clean energy). In comparison, there are low single-digit thousands (anything from 1,000 to 4,000 is defensible imo) of people working on AI safety, and collectively maybe low dozens of people working on figuring out threat models. (Most people work on ai safety engineering, some on policy). So we're 4 whole orders of magnitude behind climate change in people working on addressing the issue, and maybe 3 orders of magnitude behind on threat modeling. In terms of money, yearly spending on AI safety is in the high hundreds of millions to maybe 2 billion. In contrast, annual spending on reducing climate change (including clean energy) is in *trillions.* So we're 3-3.5 orders of magnitude behind on spending, and 4 ooms behind on people. The AI safety inputs picture looks a bit less bleak than this immediate comparison might suggest. For example, I think our average talent pool is somewhat higher human capital. There's also more latent interest/willingness-to-spend on AI safety than the "high hundreds of millions to low billions" current spending numbers might suggest. In contrast, climate change spending can't be scaled much higher (since you can't really jump OOMs above "trillions").