This looks wonderful, congrats. Dumb question on my end—there seems to be a lot of overlap in some areas with causes that Openphil target. My impression was Openphil wasn’t funding constrained in these areas and had more money to deploy than projects to put it into (maybe that’s not accurate though)
If it is—what do you see the marginal add of the Future fund being? E.g will it have a different set of criteria from Openphil such that it funds thing Openphil has seen but wouldn’t fund, or are you expecting a different pool of candidate projects that Openphil wouldn’t be seeing?
Reasonable question! Our work is highly continuous with Open Phil’s work, and our background worldview is very similar. At the moment, we’re experimenting with our open call for proposals (combined with our areas of interest and project ideas) and a regranting program. We’ll probably experiment with prizes this year, too. We’re hoping these things will help us launch some new projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I also endorse Jonas’s answer that just having more grantmaking capacity in the area will probably be helpful as well.
I’m not involved in Future Fund but I can attempt an answer. A few things to note on how this differs from Open Phil. Firstly Future Fund is:
particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Such mega projects seem to have been neglected in the EA community. This is partly due to a lack of money, but I’m not sure why Open Phil hasn’t tended to fund such projects.
Also, the Future Fund seems to be engaging in active grantmaking where they propose particular project ideas that people can take on. Open Phil seems to focus more on funding existing projects/organisations.
Hopefully someone from Future Fund answers your question though as it’s a good one and I may be off the mark here. It does seem to me though that Future Fund is a great addition to the EA funding ecosystem!
I think Open Phil is actually doing the things you say they aren’t doing. I think the main value-add of the Future Fund is additional grantmaking capacity and experimenting with different mechanisms (such as prizes and regranting pools).
OK you may well be right, although I’m not sure Open Phil is as public about specific project ideas they want to be funded as Future Fund is?
The other thing I’d say is that I don’t actually think the cause areas between Open Phil and Future Fund overlap that much. Open Phil isn’t solely longtermist and the main overlap between the two orgs seems to be AI and biosecurity.
This looks wonderful, congrats. Dumb question on my end—there seems to be a lot of overlap in some areas with causes that Openphil target. My impression was Openphil wasn’t funding constrained in these areas and had more money to deploy than projects to put it into (maybe that’s not accurate though)
If it is—what do you see the marginal add of the Future fund being? E.g will it have a different set of criteria from Openphil such that it funds thing Openphil has seen but wouldn’t fund, or are you expecting a different pool of candidate projects that Openphil wouldn’t be seeing?
Reasonable question! Our work is highly continuous with Open Phil’s work, and our background worldview is very similar. At the moment, we’re experimenting with our open call for proposals (combined with our areas of interest and project ideas) and a regranting program. We’ll probably experiment with prizes this year, too. We’re hoping these things will help us launch some new projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I also endorse Jonas’s answer that just having more grantmaking capacity in the area will probably be helpful as well.
I’m not involved in Future Fund but I can attempt an answer. A few things to note on how this differs from Open Phil. Firstly Future Fund is:
Such mega projects seem to have been neglected in the EA community. This is partly due to a lack of money, but I’m not sure why Open Phil hasn’t tended to fund such projects.
Also, the Future Fund seems to be engaging in active grantmaking where they propose particular project ideas that people can take on. Open Phil seems to focus more on funding existing projects/organisations.
Hopefully someone from Future Fund answers your question though as it’s a good one and I may be off the mark here. It does seem to me though that Future Fund is a great addition to the EA funding ecosystem!
I think Open Phil is actually doing the things you say they aren’t doing. I think the main value-add of the Future Fund is additional grantmaking capacity and experimenting with different mechanisms (such as prizes and regranting pools).
OK you may well be right, although I’m not sure Open Phil is as public about specific project ideas they want to be funded as Future Fund is?
The other thing I’d say is that I don’t actually think the cause areas between Open Phil and Future Fund overlap that much. Open Phil isn’t solely longtermist and the main overlap between the two orgs seems to be AI and biosecurity.