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 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).