Fair enough — I think I was trying to say something along the lines of "going through any specific example invites a lot of genuinely thorny and difficult questions about counterfactuality/sign of impact/attribution to EA" (and again many of these are hard to discuss on a public forum) but I think zooming out, you can see EAs fingerprints in various important places. I think this leads to an overall common-sense perspective that EA has helped improve the situation. 

Also, I agree I pointed to work in the middle of the ToC chain, but that seems kind of reasonable to me given that AI is currently not that powerful and not really that scary. AI hasn't yet been capable of causing a disaster, so it's not really possible to have prevented one (yet). 

On the specific example of Redwood Research is doing a lot of really valuable safety work. I think pioneering Control has been a fairly useful accomplishment, and I suspect if someone wanted to dig into the details, they'd find that it was fairly counterfactual. 

I guess as you disclaimed might be the case up front, I don't think these are the strongest or most informed examples of EAs impact on AI safety. 

In many of cases of such impact, one can quibble about many things:

• Whether that impact was clearly positive, or whether it had some kind of indirectly negative harmful effect, most commonly via speeding up AI development. See Paul Christiano's reflections on the impact of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback as an example.
• The counterfactuality and persistence of the impact — e.g., like you said for many of these, would this have happened (eventually) anyway?
• How attributable that was to EA (and unfortunately in some cases, due to EA having a toxic brand in many places, it's actually best if it is not that attributable to EA).
• And last "Does any of that matter? All of EAs impact — for better or worse — has been its influence on Anthropic." 

Yet, I think taken as a whole, I think EA has punched above its weight in many ways with respect to making AI go well. It's led to:

• More and better staffed AI safety/security institutes
• A richer non-profit ecosystem of safety research (like Truthful AI, FAR AI, Redwood Research, etc.)
• More and better staffed third-party evaluations, auditing, and science (METR, AVERI)
• Large amounts of field-building that encourages talented people to work on making AI go well (MATS, BlueDot, 80k)
• A significant amount of policy advocacy and public communications about AI risk.
• Probably other examples, too. 

A lot of the effort to make this happened relied on EA motivated people willing to take lower paid or less glamorous jobs.^[1] While some specific organizations' or research or policy wins or public communications would have happened otherwise, but some wouldn't, and even still, happening earlier is still better. 

I started out in EA caring about global health, and my first EA job was as a Researcher at GWWC. Even after becoming pretty convinced by AI risk and longtermism, I was still fairly sympathetic to concerns like "AI Safety alienating people". For instance, I was pretty against 80,000 Hours becoming explicitly focused on longtermism, and also pretty skeptical / worried about its pivot last year into leaning even more into AI. Now, looking at just how fast AI progress is developing, how much there is still be done to make it go well, and how valuable (I think) EA has been to date, I think I got a lot of that wrong. 

1. ^{^}

   And of course, in some cases, they happened to get pretty well-paid jobs that ended up being fairly glamorous (even if they weren't in the beginning). I don't think that undermines the impact much. I don't really begrudge the quant finance folks who give >50% of their income to charities, even if they're still pretty rich at the end of the day. 

First, OpenAI may be successful in turning a large profit based on continued marginal improvements in AI systems, so that their company continues getting much more valuable, far faster than 5% annual growth, meaning that the endowment would grow in value, that is, on net accumulating rather than distributing wealth. In this case, OpenAI’s equity will appreciate greatly; it would be irresponsible for the nonprofit not to try to spend large parts of that increased value.

In this scenario, wouldn't it be much better if the non-profit didn't spend its money now? By holding onto the money now, it'd have much more to give later. Put another way: imagine if the grantees receiving the money were asked "would you prefer $100 today or $10,000 in 6 years?" many would take the latter. 

One frame that might make this argument more compelling is that if OAI ends up building AGI and ends up having astronomical value, then the foundation is sitting on humanity's endowment. Spending it down now before it's realized its value could be very costly.

Thanks for this post!

Curious what you think of the following objection: AI character work has to grapple with the question of whether we want AI systems to be “obedient” or “ethical". Yet, it seems non-obvious which is better for the long-term future because training them to be ethical might make alignment risk worse, and training them to be obedient makes misuse and other risks worse. So if you're uncertain about which is better — which I think you probably should be — then on expectation, the impact of affecting AI character is reduced proportional to how uncertain you are. I expect there are some ways you can affect AI character work that doesn't have this "obedience vs ethical" structure, but I also suspect that the argument made in this report about the importance of such work apply less to these interventions.

Hey Arepo!

Last I heard it was something like 10% of their GCR budget.

I don't think that's right — CG gave $400m to GHW in 2025, and to get a sense of what % that might be, Alexander Berger (CEO of CG) shared that overall "Coefficient Giving directed over $1 billion in 2025" in his recent letter.

CEA: now EA-adjacent!

It seems pretty hard to argue with the idea that:

• You're more informed about what you're giving up if you take the 10% Pledge after having worked for 1–5 years,
• and it's generally a good thing to be informed before you make life-long commitments! 

But even still, I think being an undergrad at university is a pretty great time to take the 10% Pledge. Curious what you/others think of the arguments here.

One thought is: why should the default be to keep 100% of your income? The world seems on fire, money seems like it can do a lot of good, and the people we're talking about pledging are likely  pretty rich. I think in almost all cases, if you're among the richest few percent of the world, it's the right thing to do to give 10% (or more) of your income to effective charities. And I think that, even while you're an undergrad, there's a good chance you can know with very high confidence you're going to end up being among the richest few percent — assuming you're not there already. 

An analogy could be raising children as vegetarians/vegans. I think this is a totally justified thing to do, and I personally wish I was raised vegetarian/vegan, so that I never craved meat. Some think that it's not fair to impose this dietary restriction on a child who can't make an informed choice, and it'd be better to only suggest they stop eating meat after they know what it tastes like. But given that eating meat is wrong (and it's also an imposition on the child to make them eat meat before they know that it is wrong!) I don't think being an omnivore should be the default. 

There's admittedly an important disanalogy here: the parent isn't making a lifelong commitment on behalf of the child. But I think it still gets at something. At least in from my own experience, I feel like I benefited a lot from taking the 10% Pledge while at uni. If I hadn't, I think there's a good chance my commitment to my values could have drifted, and on top of that, every time I did give, it'd have felt like a big, voluntary/optional cost. Whereas now, it feels like a default, and I don't really know what it's like to do things another way (something I value!). 

That said, I think it's pretty bad if anyone — but perhaps especially undergrads/people who are less sure what they're signing up to — feels like they were pressured to make such a big commitment. And in general, it's a rough situation if someone regrets it. But I've previously seen claims that undergrads pledging is bad, and should be discouraged, which seems like a step too far, and is more what I had in mind when I wrote this (sorry if that's not really making contact with your own views, Neel!).

Just speaking for myself, I'd guess those would be the cruxes, though I don't personally see easy-fixes. I also worry that you could also err on being too cautious, by potential adding warning labels that give people an overly negative impression compared to the underlying reality. I'm curious if there are examples where you think GWWC could strike a better balance.

I think this might be symptomatic of a broader challenge for effective giving for GCR, which is that most of the canonical arguments for focusing on cost-effectiveness involve GHW-specific examples, that don't clearly generalize to the GCR space. But I don't think that indicates you shouldn't give to GCR, or care about cost-effectiveness in the GCR space — from a very plausible worldview (or at least, the worldview I have!) the GCR-focused funding opportunities are the most impactful funding opportunities available. It's just that the kind of reasoning underlying those recommendations/evaluations are quite different.

(I no longer work at GWWC, but wrote the reports on the LTFF/ECF, and was involved in the first round of evaluations more generally.) 

In general, I think GWWC's goal here is to "to support donors in having the highest expected impact given their worldview" which can come apart from supporting donors to give to the most well-researched/vetted funding opportunities. For instance, if you have a longtermist worldview, or perhaps take AI x-risk very seriously, then I'd guess you'd still want to give to the LTFF/ECF even if you thought the quality of their evaluations was lower than GiveWell's.

Some of this is discussed in "Why and how GWWC evaluates evaluators" in the limitations section:

Finally, the quality of our recommendations is highly dependent on the quality of the charity evaluation field in a cause area, and hence inconsistent across cause areas. For example, the state of charity evaluation in animal welfare is less advanced than that in global health and wellbeing, so our evaluations and the resulting recommendations in animal welfare are necessarily lower-confidence than those in global health and wellbeing.

And also in each of the individual reports, e.g. from the ACE MG report:

As such, our bar for relying on an evaluator depends on the existence and quality of other donation options we have evaluated in the same cause area.

• In cause areas where we currently rely on one or more evaluators that have passed our bar in a previous evaluation, any new evaluations we do will attempt to compare the quality of the evaluator’s marginal grantmaking and/or charity recommendations to those of the evaluator(s) we already rely on in that cause area. 
• For worldviews and associated cause areas where we don’t have existing evaluators we rely on, we expect evaluators to meet the bar of plausibly recommending giving opportunities that are among the best options for their stated worldview, compared to any other opportunity easily accessible to donors.

First just wanted to say that this:

In my first year after taking the pledge, I gave away 20% of my income. However I had been able to save and invest much of my disposable income from my relatively well paid career before taking the pledge and so had built up strong financial security for myself and my family. As a result, I increased my donations over time and since 2019, have given away 75% of my income. 

...is really inspiring :).

I'm interested in knowing more about how Allan decides where to donate. For example:

I currently split my donations between the Longview Philanthropy Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long Term Future Fund- I believe in giving to funds and letting experts with much more knowledge than me identify the best donation opportunities.

How did Allan arrive at this decision, and how confident does he feel in it? Also, how connected does Allan feel with other EtG'ers who are giving a similar amounts based on a similar worldview?