AMA for this project on the EA Forum! Ask here.

@liron Thank you so much, Liron!

@Jason Much appreciated, Jason!

@mdickens Yes, particularly because PauseAI US does lobbying and needs to closely adhere to US laws around that, we are separate legal entities. The orgs do different things-- Global is ideally an incubator for national orgs, which will handle more of the specific programming, and PauseAI US is a national org. On balance, I think you should you should give to PauseAI US. I (Holly Elmore, ED of PauseAI US) am of course biased in favor of PauseAI US's strategy, which I set, in addition to the fact that AGI companies and development are primarily here and the AI Policy of Earth is largely in the hands of the US government. I also think PauseAI US is run better and will scale in a way PauseAI Global will not be able to handle.

For one thing, PauseAI Global has no full-time employees, with Joep running most things while also running a for-profit company, and has volunteers in positions of leadership, which imo is poor planning. PauseAI US has three full-time employees working only on developing PauseAI US. He wants to pay volunteers stipends (a thing that is easy in the Netherlands); I want to use money to hire employees and have them coordinate volunteers for set programming: protesting and grassroots lobbying. PauseAI US has a dedicated lobbyist (Felix de Simone) and PauseAI Global does not, doing only sporadic one-off lobbying projects. (Again, a major difficulty here is that lobbying mostly takes place within national borders.)

PauseAI Global is currently better for digital community, you don't need to worry about nationality to join, and they maintain a larger Discord and have a stronger social media presence. Their website is very good, whereas ours is still under development. It is easier to go the PauseAI Global Discord and get involved in remote volunteering right away. However, both Global and US agree that our primary goal is to have local, in-person communities, which I believe the digital focus is selecting against. The PauseAI US Discord (new) is focused more on the org's programming, protesting and lobbying, with odd remote volunteering jobs (like graphic design) supporting those projects instead of standing on their own. Our irl local group model and focus on protests as grassroots lobbying as the primary form of volunteering makes our growth much more concentrated and scalable than a patchwork of decentralized volunteer-led projects. Plus, I anticipate that our digital presence, especially investing in an integrated events platform as part of our website and our streamlining of protest events, will scale better than Global's is currently set to as well.

PauseAI Global and PauseAI US have complementary roles to play, and I want us both to be fully funded. But on the margin, unless you specifically want global digital community stuff, PauseAI US is 1) where the action is, 2) better run, 3) more focused on higher value programming, 4) will scale better.