Are these small interventions mostly more cost-effective than larger ones?
I do think that, right now, at the margin, small interventions are particularly underfunded. I think that’s mostly because there are a variety of funders in the space (like Open Phil and SFF) which are focusing on larger organizational grants, so a lot of the remaining opportunities are more in the space of smaller and early-stage projects.
Larks also brought up another argument for the LTFF focusing on smaller projects in his last AI Alignment Review:
I can understand why the fund managers gave over a quarter of the funds to major organisations – they thought these organisations were a good use of capital! However, to my mind this undermines the purpose of the fund. (Many) individual donors are perfectly capable of evaluating large organisations that publicly advertise for donations. In donating to the LTFF, I think (many) donors are hoping to be funding smaller projects that they could not directly access themselves. As it is, such donors will probably have to consider such organisation allocations a mild ‘tax’ – to the extent that different large organisations are chosen then they would have picked themselves.
I find this argument reasonably compelling and also considered it as one of the reasons for why I want us to focus on smaller projects (though I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, reason).
In particular, I think the correct pipeline for larger projects is that the LTFF funds them initially until they have demonstrated enough traction such that funders like Open Phil, Ben Delo and SFF can more easily evaluate them.
I am not fundamentally opposed to funding medium-sized organizations for a longer period, and my model is that there is a size of organization that Open Phil and other funders are unlikely to fund, that have between 2-6 employees, due to being to small to really be worth their attention. I expect we have a good chance of providing long-term support for such organizations, if such opportunities arise (though I don’t think we have so far found such opportunities that I would be excited about, though maybe the Topos grant ends up in that category).
One clarification on Roam Research: The primary reason why we didn’t want to continue funding Roam was that we thought it very likely that Roam could get profit-oriented VC funding. And I did indeed receive an email from Connor White-Sullivan a few days ago saying that they successfully raised their seed round, parts due to having enough runway and funding security because of our grant, so I think saying that we wouldn’t fund them further was the correct call. I think for more purely charity-oriented projects, it’s more likely that we would want to support them for a longer period of time.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful response. My guess is that you have more information than I do, and are correct here, but just in case I wanted to share some thoughts that I have had that would provide some counter-evidence.
Don’t feel the need to respond to any/all of this, especially if it’s not useful to you. The LTFF would be the group who would hypothetically be taking this advice (If I were fully convinced of your side, it wouldn’t make a big difference, because I’m not doing much grantmaking myself).
First, that clarification is useful about Roam, and my main comment wasn’t really about them in particular, but rather them as an example. I’d definitely agree that if they are getting VC funding, then LTFF funding is much less important. I’m quite happy to hear that they raised their seed round![1]
I do think that, right now, at the margin, small interventions are particularly underfunded.
From my position, now, I don’t quite get this sense, just FYI. My impression is that the “big donor” funding space is somewhat sporadic and not very forthcoming in their decisions and analysis with possible donees. There are several mid-sized EA-related organizations I know that are getting very little or very sporadic (i.e. 1-off grant) funding from OpenPhil or similar without a very clear picture on how that will translate to the long term. OpenPhil itself generally only donates 50% revenue maximum, and it’s not always clear who is best to make the rest of that. It’s also of course not very preferable to rely on one or two very large donors.
Having a few dependable medium-sized donors (like Larks) is really useful to a bunch of mid-sized EA orgs. Arguably the EA Funds could effectively be like these medium-sized donors, and I could see that being similarly useful.
I hate to bring up anonymous anecdotal data, but around half of the EA orgs I’m close with (of around 7) seem to have frustrations around the existing funding situation. These are 3-40 person organizations.
Some other thoughts:
The Meta Fund seems to primarily give to medium-sized groups. I’m not convinced they are making a significant mistake, and I don’t feel like they are so different from the Long-Term Future Fund that this decision should obviously be different.
Many of the Meta Fund’s payouts (and likely those of other funds, theirs just come to mind) are to groups that then re-grant that money. The EA Community Building Grants work that way, and arguably Charity Entrepreneurship is similar. I think that to me, having an EA group give money directly to people, rather than having it first go through a more locally-respected group that can focus more on specific types of experiments, is a bit of an anti-pattern; it’s important when no group yet exists, but is generally sub-ideal. I personally would guess that $40k going to either of those two groups, would be better than the Meta Fund having given that money directly to individuals in similar reference classes (community builders and potential entrepreneurs). Having the in-between group allows for more expertise of the granter and more specialized mentorship, resources, and reputability.
Similar to (2), I’m in general more comfortable with the idea of “give money to an org to hire a person” than the idea of “give money to one person to do independent work.” The former comes with a bunch of benefits, similar to what was mentioned in (2).
I guess, backing up a bit, that there’s quite a few reasons for organizations (perhaps small ones) to generally be more efficient than individuals on their own. That said, it’s quite possible that while this may be the case, the organizations are far less neglected, and as of right now many of the individual projects are more neglected as to make them worthwhile.
I think I could buy this up to some amount of money; the amount isn’t clear. Maybe if the LTFF gets to $4mil/year it should start moving to larger things?
Related, I just checked, and it seems like the 3 other EA Fund groups all primarily have been giving to existing medium-sized orgs. It’s not obvious to me that Long-Term Future topics are dramatically different. There are big donors for those 3 categories as well, though maybe with less funding. Of course, an inconsistency could mean that they should consider changing that idea instead.
Larks also brought up another argument for the LTFF focusing on smaller projects in his last AI Alignment Review:
Larks seems like the ideal model of a medium-sized donor who’s willing to spend time evaluating the best nonprofits. I’d imagine most other donors of their contribution amount are less familiar than they are. Personally, if I were in Lark’s position, I’d prefer my money go through an interim body like the Long-Term Future Fund even when it goes to medium-sized organizations, because I wouldn’t trust my own biases, but Larks may be particularly good. Another possible benefit of the LLFF is that fewer donors could be just easier to work with.
I imagine that there are many other donors who either/both would trust a dedicated group more, or just don’t have enough money for it to be really worth the time to select (and decide against the lotteries for various reasons). Another obvious possible solution here would be to have a separate long-term fund for donors who do want to use it for medium-sized groups.
I could of course be wrong here! This is an empirical question about what the current and possible donors would want to see.
[1] I’d separately note though that I’m a bit uncomfortable about “tech things being used by EAs” to try going the VC-round, in general. The levels of scale needed for such things may require sacrifices that would make tools much less good for EA purposes; I definitely got this sense when working on Guesstimate. It may be that Roam is one of the super fortunate ones to both be able to do good for EA groups and also have a reasonable time raising money, but I think this in general is really tough and don’t generally recommend others try to copy this approach.
I ended up messaging Ozzie via PM to discuss some of the specific examples more concretely.
I think my position on all of this is better summarized by: “We are currently not receiving many applications from medium-sized organizations, and I don’t think the ones that we do receive are competitive with more individual and smaller-project grants”.
For me personally the exception here is Rethink Priorities, who have applied, who I am pretty positive on funding, and would strongly consider giving to in future rounds, though I can’t speak for the other fund members on that.
Overall, I think we ended up agreeing more on the value of medium-sized orgs, and both think the value there is pretty high, though my experience has been that not that many orgs in that reference class actually applied. And we have actually funded a significant fraction of the ones that have applied (both the AI Safety Camp, and CFAR come to mind, and we would have likely funded Rethink Priorities two rounds ago if another funder hadn’t stepped in first).
I do think that, right now, at the margin, small interventions are particularly underfunded. I think that’s mostly because there are a variety of funders in the space (like Open Phil and SFF) which are focusing on larger organizational grants, so a lot of the remaining opportunities are more in the space of smaller and early-stage projects.
Larks also brought up another argument for the LTFF focusing on smaller projects in his last AI Alignment Review:
I find this argument reasonably compelling and also considered it as one of the reasons for why I want us to focus on smaller projects (though I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, reason).
In particular, I think the correct pipeline for larger projects is that the LTFF funds them initially until they have demonstrated enough traction such that funders like Open Phil, Ben Delo and SFF can more easily evaluate them.
I am not fundamentally opposed to funding medium-sized organizations for a longer period, and my model is that there is a size of organization that Open Phil and other funders are unlikely to fund, that have between 2-6 employees, due to being to small to really be worth their attention. I expect we have a good chance of providing long-term support for such organizations, if such opportunities arise (though I don’t think we have so far found such opportunities that I would be excited about, though maybe the Topos grant ends up in that category).
One clarification on Roam Research: The primary reason why we didn’t want to continue funding Roam was that we thought it very likely that Roam could get profit-oriented VC funding. And I did indeed receive an email from Connor White-Sullivan a few days ago saying that they successfully raised their seed round, parts due to having enough runway and funding security because of our grant, so I think saying that we wouldn’t fund them further was the correct call. I think for more purely charity-oriented projects, it’s more likely that we would want to support them for a longer period of time.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful response. My guess is that you have more information than I do, and are correct here, but just in case I wanted to share some thoughts that I have had that would provide some counter-evidence.
Don’t feel the need to respond to any/all of this, especially if it’s not useful to you. The LTFF would be the group who would hypothetically be taking this advice (If I were fully convinced of your side, it wouldn’t make a big difference, because I’m not doing much grantmaking myself).
First, that clarification is useful about Roam, and my main comment wasn’t really about them in particular, but rather them as an example. I’d definitely agree that if they are getting VC funding, then LTFF funding is much less important. I’m quite happy to hear that they raised their seed round![1]
From my position, now, I don’t quite get this sense, just FYI. My impression is that the “big donor” funding space is somewhat sporadic and not very forthcoming in their decisions and analysis with possible donees. There are several mid-sized EA-related organizations I know that are getting very little or very sporadic (i.e. 1-off grant) funding from OpenPhil or similar without a very clear picture on how that will translate to the long term. OpenPhil itself generally only donates 50% revenue maximum, and it’s not always clear who is best to make the rest of that. It’s also of course not very preferable to rely on one or two very large donors.
Having a few dependable medium-sized donors (like Larks) is really useful to a bunch of mid-sized EA orgs. Arguably the EA Funds could effectively be like these medium-sized donors, and I could see that being similarly useful.
I hate to bring up anonymous anecdotal data, but around half of the EA orgs I’m close with (of around 7) seem to have frustrations around the existing funding situation. These are 3-40 person organizations.
Some other thoughts:
The Meta Fund seems to primarily give to medium-sized groups. I’m not convinced they are making a significant mistake, and I don’t feel like they are so different from the Long-Term Future Fund that this decision should obviously be different.
Many of the Meta Fund’s payouts (and likely those of other funds, theirs just come to mind) are to groups that then re-grant that money. The EA Community Building Grants work that way, and arguably Charity Entrepreneurship is similar. I think that to me, having an EA group give money directly to people, rather than having it first go through a more locally-respected group that can focus more on specific types of experiments, is a bit of an anti-pattern; it’s important when no group yet exists, but is generally sub-ideal. I personally would guess that $40k going to either of those two groups, would be better than the Meta Fund having given that money directly to individuals in similar reference classes (community builders and potential entrepreneurs). Having the in-between group allows for more expertise of the granter and more specialized mentorship, resources, and reputability.
Similar to (2), I’m in general more comfortable with the idea of “give money to an org to hire a person” than the idea of “give money to one person to do independent work.” The former comes with a bunch of benefits, similar to what was mentioned in (2).
I guess, backing up a bit, that there’s quite a few reasons for organizations (perhaps small ones) to generally be more efficient than individuals on their own. That said, it’s quite possible that while this may be the case, the organizations are far less neglected, and as of right now many of the individual projects are more neglected as to make them worthwhile.
I think I could buy this up to some amount of money; the amount isn’t clear. Maybe if the LTFF gets to $4mil/year it should start moving to larger things?
Related, I just checked, and it seems like the 3 other EA Fund groups all primarily have been giving to existing medium-sized orgs. It’s not obvious to me that Long-Term Future topics are dramatically different. There are big donors for those 3 categories as well, though maybe with less funding. Of course, an inconsistency could mean that they should consider changing that idea instead.
Larks seems like the ideal model of a medium-sized donor who’s willing to spend time evaluating the best nonprofits. I’d imagine most other donors of their contribution amount are less familiar than they are. Personally, if I were in Lark’s position, I’d prefer my money go through an interim body like the Long-Term Future Fund even when it goes to medium-sized organizations, because I wouldn’t trust my own biases, but Larks may be particularly good. Another possible benefit of the LLFF is that fewer donors could be just easier to work with.
I imagine that there are many other donors who either/both would trust a dedicated group more, or just don’t have enough money for it to be really worth the time to select (and decide against the lotteries for various reasons). Another obvious possible solution here would be to have a separate long-term fund for donors who do want to use it for medium-sized groups.
I could of course be wrong here! This is an empirical question about what the current and possible donors would want to see.
[1] I’d separately note though that I’m a bit uncomfortable about “tech things being used by EAs” to try going the VC-round, in general. The levels of scale needed for such things may require sacrifices that would make tools much less good for EA purposes; I definitely got this sense when working on Guesstimate. It may be that Roam is one of the super fortunate ones to both be able to do good for EA groups and also have a reasonable time raising money, but I think this in general is really tough and don’t generally recommend others try to copy this approach.
I ended up messaging Ozzie via PM to discuss some of the specific examples more concretely.
I think my position on all of this is better summarized by: “We are currently not receiving many applications from medium-sized organizations, and I don’t think the ones that we do receive are competitive with more individual and smaller-project grants”.
For me personally the exception here is Rethink Priorities, who have applied, who I am pretty positive on funding, and would strongly consider giving to in future rounds, though I can’t speak for the other fund members on that.
Overall, I think we ended up agreeing more on the value of medium-sized orgs, and both think the value there is pretty high, though my experience has been that not that many orgs in that reference class actually applied. And we have actually funded a significant fraction of the ones that have applied (both the AI Safety Camp, and CFAR come to mind, and we would have likely funded Rethink Priorities two rounds ago if another funder hadn’t stepped in first).