Main points in favor of this grant
I think that SAEs are a big deal in interpretability, with lots of valuable interp work that can be unlocked with good SAEs. Developing, understanding and using SAEs is the major focus of both Anthropic's mech interp team and my team (Google DeepMind mech interp). I feel like SAE training is currently very janky and pre-paradigmatic and I would love to see progress here.
Why grant to Glen? I was particularly impressed by the ProLU work. Though it was, unfortunately, highly similar to my team's Gated SAE work, making the actual impact lower, I think ProLU was a good and principled idea that correctly identified a flaw in SAE training, and empirically showed that it was a significant improvement. Further, I think Glen broadly did the right things to show that it was an improvement, and did the leg work of training a bunch of SAEs on a range of models, layers and sites (though was bottlenecked on compute I think) and carefully comparing Pareto frontiers - this makes me more optimistic that if Glen finds an important improvement, he'll present enough evidence for me to believe him! I thought the write-up was pretty rough, but it was quite rushed, so that's not a major consideration.
We had a call, and I thought Glen was thinking about things sensibly. In particular, he had a strong emphasis on iterating fast, building the infra to try out many ideas quickly, and doubling down on any idea that meets a moderately high quality bar. I think this is a great way to do this kind of research. Another good sign is that Glen said ProLU felt less interesting to him than some of his other ideas, but had better empirical results, so was higher priority and he doubled down on it - being willing to be pragmatic like this and prioritise results makes this kind of research go much better!
Donor's main reservations
Even with a grant, this kind of research is much easier to do inside a lab, where you have a lot of compute, and more engineering expertise. There are people in labs working on this, eg Anthropic has a several person sub-team on science + scaling of SAEs. But there's many problems to work on, and ultimately not many researchers working on it, and Glen seems to have many interesting ideas, so I'm not too concerned about this. There is risk of duplicate work, eg ProLU and Gated SAEs, but I don't think that's a strong enough consideration to sink the grant.
I'm generally pretty wary of people doing independent research, especially junior researchers, with concerns specifically around lacking structure, accountability, motivation, feedback/mentorship, and stability. Glen says he hasn't been experiencing any issues with executive function, which is great! I've encouraged him to look for collaborators, and ideally a mentor, which would make me feel much better about the grant. It doesn't sound like independent research is his long-term plan, which makes me feel better about this.
Glen doesn't have much of a research track record, making it hard to be confident in this going well. But he seems promising, and I think it's good to give promising, inexperienced researchers a chance to prove themselves.
I have some concerns that this grant could result in a bunch of half-baked research threads, with no public write-up or clear conclusions. But Glen seems pretty motivated to make that not happen, and I think he also has a strong incentive to produce something legible and cool to eg help with future grant/job apps
Process for deciding amount
I'm honestly pretty confused about how to think about grant amounts here. $9K/month seems not crazy salary for someone living in SF, but I'd happily follow default rates for independent researchers if anyone has compiled them! $2K/month for compute seems enough to make it not a bottleneck without being too big a fraction of the grant. I'm funding this up to 5 months to balance between wanting Glen to have runway and a chance to prove himself, and wanting to see results before I recommend a larger/longer grant. If other grantmakers are excited about Glen's work I'd be happy to see them donating more though.
Conflicts of interest
Glen did my MATS training program about 6 months ago. I do a lot of SAE research, and expect to benefit from better knowledge of SAE training, but in the same way that the whole community will!