I am an earlyish crypto investor who has accumulated enough to be a mid-sized grantmaker, and I intend to donate most of my money over the next 5-10 years to try and increase the chances that humanity has a wonderful future. My best guess is that this is mostly decided by whether we pass the test of AI alignment, so that’s my primary focus.
AI alignment has lots of money flowing into it, with some major organizations not running fundraisers, Zvi characterizing SFF as having “too much money”, OpenPhil expanding its grantmaking for the cause, FTX setting themselves up as another major grantmaker, and ACX reporting the LTFF’s position as:
what actually happened was that the Long Term Future Fund approached me and said “we will fund every single good AI-related proposal you get, just hand them to us, you don’t have to worry about it”
So the challenge is to find high-value funding opportunities in a crowded space.
One option would be to trust that the LTFF or whichever organization I pick will do something useful with the money, and I think this is a perfectly valid default choice. However, I suspect that as the major grantmakers are well-funded, I have a specific comparative advantage over them in allocating my funds: I have much more time per unit money to assess, advise, and mentor my grantees. It helps that I have enough of an inside view of what kinds of things might be valuable that I have some hope of noticing gold when I strike it. Additionally, I can approach people who would not normally apply to a fund.
What is my grantmaking strategy?
First, I decided what parts of the cause to focus on. I’m most interested in supporting alignment infrastructure, because I feel relatively more qualified to judge the effectiveness of interventions to improve the funnel which takes in people who don’t know about alignment in one end, takes them through increasing levels of involvement, and (when successful) ends with people who make notable contributions. I’m also excited about funding frugal people to study or do research which seems potentially promising to my inside view.
Next, I increased my surface area with places which might have good giving opportunities by involving myself with many parts of the movement. This includes Rob Miles’s Discord, AI Safety Support’s Slack, in-person communities, EleutherAI, and the LW/EA investing Discord, where there are high concentrations of relevant people, and exploring my non-EA social networks for promising people. I also fund myself to spend most of my time helping out with projects, advising people, and learning about what it takes to build things.
Then, I put out feelers towards people who are either already doing valuable work unfunded or appear to have the potential and drive to do so if they were freed of financial constraints. This generally involves getting to know them well enough that I have a decent picture of their skills, motivation structure, and life circumstances. I put some thought into the kind of work I would be most excited to see them do, then discuss this with them and offer them a ~1 year grant (usually $14k-20k, so far) as a trial. I also keep an eye open for larger projects which I might be able to kickstart.
When an impact certificate market comes into being (some promising signs on the horizon!), I intend to sell the impact of funding the successful projects and use the proceeds to continue grantmaking for longer.
Alongside sharing my models of how to grantmake in this area and getting advice on it, the secondary purpose of this post is to pre-register my intent to sell impact in order to strengthen the connection between future people buying my impact and my current decisions. I’ll likely make another post in two or three years with a menu of impact purchases for both donations and volunteer work I do, once it’s more clear which ones produced something of value.
I have donated about $40,000 in the past year, and committed around $200,000 over the next two years using this strategy. I welcome comments, questions, and advice on improving it.
Okay, but if you’re not actually talking about “malicious” retro funders (a category in which I would include actions that are not typically considered malicious today, such as defecting against minority or nonhuman interests), the difference between a world with and without impact markets becomes very subtle and ambiguous in my mind.
Like, I would guess that Anthropic and Conjecture are probably good, though I know little about them. I would guess that early OpenAI was very bad and current OpenAI is probably bad. But I feel great uncertainty over all of that. And I’m not even taking all considerations into account that I’m aware of because we still don’t have a model of how they interact. I don’t see a way in which impact markets could systematically prevent (as opposed to somewhat reduce) investment mistakes that today not even funders as sophisticated as Open Phil can predict.
Currently, all these groups receive a lot of funding from the altruistic funders directly. In a world with impact markets, the money would first come from investors. Not much would change at all. In fact I see most benefits here in the incentive alignment with employees.
In my models, each investor makes fewer grants than funders currently do because they specialize more and are more picky. My math doesn’t work out, doesn’t show that they can plausibly make a profit, if they’re similarly or less picky than current funders.
So I could see a drop in sophistication as relatively unskilled investors enter the market. But then they’d have to improve or get filtered out within a few years as they lose their capital to more sophisticated investors.
Relatively speaking, I think I’m more concerned about the problem you pointed out where retro funders get scammed by issuers who use p-hacking-inspired tricks to make their certificates seem valuable when they are not. Sophisticated retro funders can probably address that about as well as top journals can, which is already not perfect, but more naive retro funders and investors may fall for it.
One new thing that we’re doing to address this is to encourage people to write exposés of malicious certificates and sell their impact. Eventually of course I also want people to be able to short issuer stock.