Somebody has already done this once, forty feet away.

Before any of this

A 3D-printing business, and a well-timed bet.

Greg Colbourn is a former 3D-printing entrepreneur. By the end of 2017 he had made a substantial amount of money on cryptocurrency, at a point when a lot of people were making and losing money on cryptocurrency.

What he did with it is the part that matters. Rather than keeping it or spreading it thinly across charities, he spent it on a specific bottleneck he'd noticed: capable people who wanted to work on important problems full-time couldn't afford to, because rent forced them into jobs that ate the hours.

2018

He bought a hotel in Blackpool.

In June 2018 he bought a seventeen-room hotel in Blackpool for £130,000 and turned it into free accommodation for people doing independent work on high-impact problems. It became known as the EA Hotel.

The choice of Blackpool was arithmetic rather than sentiment. The town boomed as a holiday destination and then declined when cheap foreign travel arrived, leaving behind a great many hotels that had never been granted permission to convert to housing. They are among the cheapest usable buildings in the developed world. A pound spent on a building in Blackpool houses several times more people than a pound spent almost anywhere else in Britain.

2020 onwards

It became a registered charity, and he stepped away.

In 2020 the hotel was formally established as CEEALAR—the Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research, registered charity number 1189768. It provides accommodation, meals and stipends so that residents can work full-time without financial pressure, and it has housed a long succession of researchers, founders and organisers since.

Greg handed it over and stepped back from running it. That's the part worth dwelling on: the project outlived its founder's involvement, which is not what happens to vanity projects. It is still there, still operating, and it is the building next door. You can walk round and ask the people living in it what it's like.

Now

Why a second house rather than a bigger one.

CEEALAR supports people working on a range of problems, and a good deal of the AI work done there is on alignment—the effort to make a superintelligent system safe to build.

Moratorium House exists because not everyone thinks that effort will succeed in time. If it won't, then the work that matters isn't making the thing safe; it's stopping it from being built yet. That's a different project, it attracts different people, and it turns out to be easier to do in a separate building with its own culture than as a faction inside someone else's.

So: same model, same street, different premise. Greg funds this house as he funded that one, and the two sets of residents argue with each other over the garden wall, which is healthy for everyone concerned.