Thanks for this and great diagrams! To think about what the relationship between EA and AI safety, it might help about what EA is for in general. I see a/the purpose of EA is helping people figure out how they can do the most good - to learn about the different paths, the options, and the landscape. In that sense, EA is a bit like a university, or a market, or maybe even just a signpost: once you've learnt what you needed, or found what you want and where to go, you don't necessarily stick around: maybe you need to 'go out' in the world to do what calls you. 

This explains your venn diagram: GHD and animal welfare are causes that exist prior to, and independent of EA. They, rather than EA, are where the action is if you prioritise those things. AI safety grew up inside EA. 

I imagine AI safety will naturally form it own ecosytem independent of EA: much like, if you care about global development, you don't need to participate in the EA community, a time will come when, for AI safety, you won't need to participate in EA either. 

This doesn't mean that EA becomes irrelevant, much like a university doesn't stop mattering when students graduate - or a market ceases to be useful when some people find what they want. There will be further cohorts who want to learn - and some people have to stick around to think about and highlight their options.

Would be nice to know what you are basing these diagrams on, other than intuition. If you are very present on the forum and mainly focused on AI of course that is going to be your intuition. Here are the dangers of this intuition I find to exist about this topic : 

It's a self-reenforcing thing : people deep into AI or newly converted are much more likely to think that EA revolves essentially around AI, and people outside of AI might think 'Oh that's what the community is about now' and don't feel like they belong here. Someone who just lurks out there and see that the forum is now almost exclusively filled with posts on AI will now think that EA is definitely about longtermism.

Funding is also a huge signal. With OpenPhil funding essentially AI and other longtermist projects, for someone who is struggling to find a job (yes we have a few talents who are being aked out everywhere but that's not the case of the majority even for highly-educated EAs), it is easy to think in a opportunistic way and switch to AI out of necessity instead of conviction, see McAskill quote very relevantly cited by someone in the comments. 

And finally, the message given by people at the top. If CEA focuses a lot of Ai career switches and think of other career switches as neutral, of course community builders will focus on AI people. Which means, factually, more men with a STEM background (we have excellent women working at visible and prestigious jobs in AI that's true, but unless we consciously try to find a concrete way of making women entering the field it is going to be difficult to maintain this, and this is not a priority so far) since the ratio men/women in STEM is still very not in favor of women. The community might thus become even more masculine, and even more STEM (exception made to philosophers and policy-makers but the funds for such jobs are still scarce). I know this isn't a problem for some here as many of the posts about diversity and their comments attest it, but for those who do see the problem with narrowing down even further, the point is made.  And it's just dangerous to focus on helping people switching to AI if in the need the number of jobs doesn't grow as expected. 

So all the ingredients are there for EA to turn into a practically exclusively AI community, but as D. Nash said, differentiating between the two might actually be more fruitful. 

Also I'm  not sure that I want to look back in five years and realize that what made the strength of EA--a highly diverse community in terms of interests and centers of impact, and a measurable impact in the world (I might be very wrong here but so far measuring impact for all these new AI orgs is difficult as we clearly lack data and it's a new field of understanding--, has just disappeared. It's OK to be seen as nerds and elitist (because let's face it, that is how EA is seen in the mainstream) is fine as long as we have concrete impact to show for it, but if we become an exclusively technical community that is all about ML and AI governance, it is going to be even more difficult to get traction outside of EA (and we might want to care about that, as explained in a recent post on AI advocacy). 

I know I'm going against the grain here, but I like to think that all these 'EA open to criticism' thinggy is not a thing of the past. And I truly think that these points need to be addressed, instead of being drown under the new enthusiasm for AI. And if needed to be said : I do realize how important AI is, and how impactful working on it is. I just think that it is not enough to go all-AI, and that many here tend to forget other dynamics and factors playing because of the AI takeover in the community.

I've written a bit about this here and think that they would both be better off if they were more distinct.

As AI safety has grown over the last few years there may have been missed growth opportunities from not having a larger separated identity.

I spoke to someone at EAG London 2023 who didn't realise that AI safety would get discussed at EAG until someone suggested they should go after doing an AI safety fellowship. There are probably many examples of people with an interest in emerging tech risks who would have got more involved at an earlier time if they'd been presented with those options at the beginning.

Tom - you raise some fascinating issues, and your Venn diagrams, however impressionistic they might be, are useful visualizations.

I do hope that AI safety remains an important part of EA -- not least because I think there is some important, under-explored overlap between AI safety and the other key cause areas, global health & development, and animal welfare.

For example, I'm working on an essay about animal welfare implications of AGI. Ideally, advanced AI wouldn't just be 'aligned' with human interests, but with the interests of the other 70,000 species of sentient vertebrates (and the sentient invertebrates). But very little has been written about this so far. So, AI safety has a serious anthropocentrism bias that needs challenging. The EAs who have worked on animal welfare could have a lot to say about AI safety issues in relation to other species.

Likewise, the 'e/acc' cult (which dismisses AI safety concerns, and advocates AGI development ASAP), often argues that there's a moral imperative to develop AGI, in order to promote global health and development (e.g. 'solving longevity' and 'promoting economic growth'). EA people who have worked on global health and development could contribute a lot to the debate over whether AGI is strictly necessary to promote longevity and prosperity.

So, the Venn diagrams need to overlap even more!