For the past few years, I've generally mostly heard from alignment grantmakers that they're bottlenecked by projects/people they want to fund, not by amount of money. Grantmakers generally had no trouble funding the projects/people they found object-level promising, with money left over. In that environment, figuring out how to turn marginal dollars into new promising researchers/projects - e.g. by finding useful recruitment channels or designing useful training programs - was a major problem.
Within the past month or two, that situation has reversed. My understanding is that alignment grantmaking is now mostly funding-bottlenecked. This is mostly based on word-of-mouth, but for instance, I heard that the recent lightspeed grants round received far more applications than they could fund which passed the bar for basic promising-ness. I've also heard that the Long-Term Future Fund (which funded my current grant) now has insufficient money for all the grants they'd like to fund.
I don't know whether this is a temporary phenomenon, or longer-term. Alignment research has gone mainstream, so we should expect both more researchers interested and more funders interested. It may be that the researchers pivot a bit faster, but funders will catch up later. Or, it may be that the funding bottleneck becomes the new normal. Regardless, it seems like grantmaking is at least funding-bottlenecked right now.
Some takeaways:
- If you have a big pile of money and would like to help, but haven't been donating much to alignment because the field wasn't money constrained, now is your time!
- If this situation is the new normal, then earning-to-give for alignment may look like a more useful option again. That said, at this point committing to an earning-to-give path would be a bet on this situation being the new normal.
- Grants for upskilling, training junior people, and recruitment make a lot less sense right now from grantmakers' perspective.
- For those applying for grants, asking for less money might make you more likely to be funded. (Historically, grantmakers consistently tell me that most people ask for less money than they should; I don't know whether that will change going forward, but now is an unusually probable time for it to change.)
Note that I am not a grantmaker, I'm just passing on what I hear from grantmakers in casual conversation. If anyone with more knowledge wants to chime in, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks for your kind words! And as for being sorry, hardly your fault, given that the relevant public writings are between a few days and 2 weeks old!
I'm not sure. We've always been low on grantmaking capacity at least since I've joined in early 2022, and the relative capacity: applications ratio has gotten even worse this year. This resulted in us prioritizing our limited LTFF time on grant evaluations rather than donor engagement or big picture strategic calls. It has also resulted in a number of other deficiencies in LTFF like lack of reliability in responding to time-sensitive applications, see some of Asya's reflections here.
We've onboarded a few more guest fund managers (grantmakers) so hopefully the grant evals will be faster. I've also decided recently to devote a significantly higher percentage of time on EA Funds/LTFF rather than my historical "day job" at Rethink Priorities, at least until the situation is a bit more stable.
Anyway, one of my bigger priorities in the upcoming weeks/months is to understand donor concerns, communicate with donors and the EA public more, possibly pitch specific donors about our funding needs, etc. Hopefully this will give us more clarity into whether my tentative assessment (that LTFF's current marginal grant is equal to or better than other marginal longtermist expenditures) is accurate, vs donors are correctly responding to changes in the funding landscape by prioritizing other, better, longtermist donation opportunities.