I think it would be really useful for there to be more public clarification on the relationship between effective altruism and Open Philanthropy.
My impression is that:
1. OP is the large majority funder of most EA activity.
2. Many EAs assume that OP is a highly EA organization, including the top.
3. OP really tries to explicitly not take responsibility for EA and does not claim to themselves be highly EA.
4. EAs somewhat assume that OP leaders are partially accountable to the EA community, but OP leaders would mostly disagree.
5. From the point of view of many EAs, EA represents something like a community of people with similar goals and motivations. There's some expectations that people will look out for each other.
6. From the point of view of OP, EA is useful insofar as it provides valuable resources (talent, sometimes ideas and money).
My impression is that OP basically treats the OP-EA relationship as a set of transactions, each with positive expected value. Like, they would provide a $20k grant to a certain community, if they expect said community to translate into over $20k of value via certain members who would soon take on jobs at certain companies. Perhaps in-part because there are some overlapping friendships, I think that OP staff often explicitly try to only fund EAs in ways that make the clearest practical sense for specific OP goals, like hiring AI safety researchers.
In comparison, I think a lot of EAs think of EA as some kind of holy-ish venture tied to an extended community of people who will care about each other. To them, EA itself is an incredibly valuable idea and community that itself has the potential to greatly change the world. (I myself is more in this latter camp)
So on one side, we have a group that often views EA through reductive lenses, like as a specific recruiting arm. And on the other side, it's more of a critical cultural movement.
I think it's very possible for both sides to live in unison, but I think at the moment there's a lot of confusion about this. I think a lot of EAs assume that OP shares a lot of the same beliefs they do.
If it is the case that OP is fairly narrow in its views and goals with EA, I would hope that other EAs realize that there might be a gap of [leaders+funders who care about EA for the reasons that EAs care about EA]. It's just weird and awkward to have your large-majority funder be a group that just treats you very reductively.
As a simple example, if one thinks of EA as something akin to a key social movement/community, one might care a lot about:
- The long-term health and growth of EA
- The personal health of specific EAs, not just the very most productive ones
- EA being an institution known for being highly honest and trustworthy
But if one thinks of them through a reductive lens, I'd expect them to care more about:
- Potential short-term hires or funding
- Potential liabilities
- Community members not being too annoying with criticisms and stuff
I've met a few people who felt very betrayed by EA - I suspect that the above confusion is one reason why. I think that a lot of EA recruiters argue that EA represents a healthy community/movement. This seems like the most viral message, it's not a surprise that people doing recruiting and promotion would lean on this idea. But if much of EA funding is really functionally treating it as a recruiting network, then that would be a disconnect.
Related, I've though that "EA Global has major community and social movement vibes, but has the financial incentives in line with a recruiting fair."
Both perspectives can coexist, but greater clarity seems very useful, and might expose some important gaps.
A bit sad to find out that Open Philanthropy’s (now Coefficient Giving) GCR Cause Prioritization team is no more.
I heard it was removed/restructured mid-2025. Seems like most of the people were distributed to other parts of the org. I don't think there were public announcements of this, though it is quite possible I missed something.
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
There don't seem to be many active online artifacts about this team, but I found this hiring post from early 2024, and this previous AMA.
Thanks for flagging this, Ozzie. I led the GCR Cause Prio team for the last year before it was wound down, so I can add some context.
The honest summary is that the team never really achieved product-market fit. Despite the name, we weren't really doing “cause prioritization” as most people would conceive of it. GCR program teams have wide remits within their areas and more domain expertise and networks than we had, so the separate cause prio team model didn't work as well as it does for GHW, where it’s more fruitful to dig into new literatures and build quantitative models. In practice, our work ended up being a mix of supporting a variety of projects for different program teams and trying to improve grant evaluation methods. GCR leadership felt that this set-up wasn’t on track to answer their most important strategy and research questions and that it wasn’t worth the opportunity cost of the people on the team. GCR leadership are considering alternative paths forward, though haven’t decided on anything yet.
I don't think there are any other comparably major structural changes at Coefficient to flag, other than that we’re trying to scale Good Ventures' giving and work with other partners, as described in our name change announcement post. I’ll also note that the Worldview Investigation team also wound down in H2, although that case was because team members left for other high-impact roles (e.g. Joe) and not through a top-down decision. This means that there's no longer much dedicated pure research capacity within GCR, though grantmaking here is fairly contiguous with research in practice.
Thanks so much for this response! That's really useful to know. I really appreciate the transparency and clarity here.
Hope that the team members of it are all doing well now.
Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil's GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don't seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?
What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative?
I don't mean to sound too negative on this - I did just say "a bit sad" on that one specific point.
Do I think that CE is doing worse or better overall? It seems like Coefficient has been making a bunch of changes, and I don't feel like I have a good handle on the details. They've also been expanding a fair bit. I'd naively assume that a huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes to hire and grow, and that this is putting CE in a better place on average.
I would expect this (the GCR prio team change) to be some evidence that specific ambitious approaches to GCR prioritization are more limited now. I think there are a bunch of large projects that could be done in this area that would probably take a team to do well, and right now it's not clear who else could do such projects.
Bigger-picture, I personally think GCR prioritization/strategy is under-investigated, but I respect that others have different priorities.