We think it’s good that people are asking hard questions about the AI landscape and the incentives faced by different participants in the policy discussion, including us. We’d also like to see a broader range of organizations and funders getting involved in this area, and we are actively working to help more funders engage.
Here’s a story I recently heard from someone I trust:
An AI Safety project got their grant application approved by OpenPhil, but still had more room for funding. After OpenPhil promised them a grant but before it was paid out, this same project also got a promise of funding from Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). When OpenPhil found out about this, they rolled back the amount of money the would pay to this project, buy the exact amount that this project was promised by SFF, rendering the SFF grant meaningless.
I don’t think this is ok behaviour, and definitely not what you do to get more funders involved.
Is some context I’m missing here? Or has there been some misunderstanding? Or is this as bad as it looks?
I’m not going to name either the source or the project publicly (they can name themselves if they want to), since I don’t want to get anyone else in to trouble, or risk their chances of getting OpenPhil funding. I also want to make clear that I’m writing this on my own initiativ.
There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all, and I think this sort of things are worth calling out.
Edit: I’ve partly misunderstood what happened. See comment below for clarification. My apologies.
I misunderstood the order of events, which does change the story in important ways. The way OpenPhil handled this is not ideal for encouraging other funders, but there were no broken promises.
I apologise and I will try to be more careful in the future.
One reason I was too quick on this is that I am concerned about the dynamics that come with having a single overwhelmingly dominant donor in AI Safety (and other EA cause areas), which I don’t think is healthy for the field. But this situation is not OpenPhils fault.
Below the story from someone who was involved. They have asked to stay anonymous, please respect this.
The short version of the story is: (1) we applied to OP for funding, (2) late 2022/early-2023 we were in active discussions with them, (3) at some point, we received 200k USD via the SFF speculator grants, (4) then OP got back confirming that they would fund is with the amount for the “lower end” budget scenario minus those 200k.
My rough sense is similar to what e.g. Oli describes in the comments. It’s roughly understandable to me that they didn’t want to give the full amount they would have been willing to fund without other funding coming in. At the same time, it continues to feel pretty off to me that they let the SFF specultor grant 1:1 replace their funding, without even talking to SFF at all—since this means that OP got to spend a counterfactual 200k on other things they liked, but SFF did not get to spend additional funding on things they consider high priority.
One thing I regret on my end, in retrospect, is not pushing harder on this, including clarifying to OP that the SFF funding we received was partially uncoined, i.e. it wasn’t restricted to funding only the specific program that OP gave us (coined) funding for. But, importantly, I don’t think I made that sufficiently clear to OP and I can’t claim to know what they would have done if I had pushed for that more confidently.
[I work at Open Philanthropy] Hi Linda–-- thanks for flagging this. After checking internally, I’m not sure what project you’re referring to here; generally speaking, I agree with you/others in this thread that it’s not good to fully funge against incoming funds from other grantmakers in the space after agreeing to fund something, but I’d want to have more context on the specifics of the situation.
It totally makes sense that you don’t want to name the source or project, but if you or your source would feel comfortable sharing more information, feel free to DM me or ask your source to DM me (or use Open Phil’s anonymous feedback form). (And just to flag explicitly, we would/do really appreciate this kind of feedback.)
Without any context on this situation, I can totally imagine worlds where this is reasonable behaviour, though perhaps poorly communicated, especially if SFF didn’t know they had OpenPhil funding. I personally had a grant from OpenPhil approved for X, but in the meantime had another grantmaker give me a smaller grant for y < X, and OpenPhil agreed to instead fund me for X—y, which I thought was extremely reasonable.
In theory, you can imagine OpenPhil wanting to fund their “fair share” of a project, evenly split across all other interested grantmakers. But it seems harmful and inefficient to wait for other grantmakers to confirm or deny, so “I’ll give you 100%, but lower that to 50% if another grantmaker is later willing to go in as well” seems a more efficient version.
I can also imagine that they eg think a project is good if funded up to $100K, but worse if funded up to $200K (eg that they’d try to scale too fast, as has happened with multiple AI Safety projects that I know of!). If OpenPhil funds $100K, and the counterfactual is $0, that’s a good grant. But if SFF also provides $100K, that totally changes the terms, and now OpenPhil’s grant is actively negative (from their perspective).
I don’t know what the right social norms here are, and I can see various bad effects on the ecosystem from this behaviour in general—incentivising grantees to be dishonest about whether they have other funding, disincentivising other grantmakers from funding anything they think OpenPhil might fund, etc. I think Habryka’s suggestion of funging, but not to 100% seems reasonable and probably better to me.
Without any context on this situation, I can totally imagine worlds where this is reasonable behaviour, though perhaps poorly communicated, especially if SFF didn’t know they had OpenPhil funding. I personally had a grant from OpenPhil approved for X, but in the meantime had another grantmaker give me a smaller grant for y < X, and OpenPhil agreed to instead fund me for X—y, which I thought was extremely reasonable.
Thanks for sharing.
What the other grantmaker (the one who gave your y) though of this?
Where they aware of your OpenPhil grant when they offered you funding?
Did OpenPhil role back your grant because you did not have use for more than X or some other reason?
I got the OpenPhil grant only after the other grant went through (and wasn’t thinking much about OpenPhil when I applied for the other grant). I never thought to inform the other grant maker after I got the OpenPhil grant, which maybe I should have in hindsight out of courtesy?
This was covering some salary for a fixed period of research, partially retroactive, after an FTX grant fell through. So I guess I didn’t have use for more than X, in some sense (I’m always happy to be paid a higher salary! But I wouldn’t have worked for a longer period of time, so I would have felt a bit weird about the situation)
I understand posting this here, but for following up specific cases like this, especially second hand I think it’s better to first contact OpenPhil before airing it publicly. Like you mentioned there is likely to be much context here we don’t have, and it’s hard to have a public discussion without most of the context.
“There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all”
That’s a fair comment I understand the importance of overcoming the bent toward inaction, but I feel like even sending this exact message you posted here to OpenPhil first might have been a better start to the conversation.
And even if it was to be posted, I think it may be better to come from the people directly involved Even if pseudo anonymously (open Phil would know who it was probably) rather than a third party.
I say this with fairly low confidence. I appreciate the benefits of transparency as well and I appreciate overcoming the inertia of doing nothing as well, which I agree is probably worse.
I think it’s better to first contact OpenPhil [OP] before airing it publicly
I tend to agree. At least based on my experience, people at OP are reasonably responsive. Here are my success rates privately contacting people at OP[1] (“successful attempts[2]”/”attempts[3]”):
There are benefit of having this discussion in public, regardless of how responsive OpenPhil staff are.
By posting this publicly I already found out that they did the same to Neal Nanda. Neal though that in his case he though this was “extremely reasonable”. I’m not sure why and I’ve just asked some follow up questions.
I get from your response that you think 45% is good response record, but that depends on how you look at it. In the reference class of major grantmakers it’s not bad, and don’t think OpenPhil is dong something wrong for not responding to more email. They have other important work to do. But, I also have other important work to do. I’m also not doing anything wrong by not spending extra time figuring out who at their staff to contact and send a private email, which according to your data, has a 55% chance ending up ignored.
There are benefit of having this discussion in public, regardless of how responsive OpenPhil staff are.
I agree. I was not clear. I meant that, for this case, I think “public criticism after private criticism” > “public criticism before private criticism” > “public criticism without private criticism” > “private criticism without public criticism”. So I am glad you commented if the alternative was no comment at all.
I get from your response that you think 45% is good response record, but that depends on how you look at it. In the reference class of major grantmakers it’s not bad, and don’t think OpenPhil is dong something wrong for not responding to more email.
Yes, I would say the response rate is good enough to justify getting in touch (unless we are talking about people who consistently did not reply to past emails). At the same time, I actually think people at Open Phil might be doing something wrong by not replying to some of my emails assuming they read them, because it is possible to reply to an email in 10 s. For example, by saying something like “Thanks. Sorry, but I do not plan to look into this.”. I guess people assume this is as bad or worse than no reply, but I would rather have a short reply, so I suppose I should clarify this in future emails.
If this was for any substantial amount of money I think it would be pretty bad, though it depends on the relative size of the OP grants and SFF grants.
I think most of the time you should just let promised funding be promised funding, but there is a real and difficult coordination problem here. The general rule I follow when I have been a recommender on the SFF or Lightspeed Grants has been that when I am coordinating with another funder, and we both give X dollars a year but want to fund the organization to different levels (let’s call them level A for me and level B for them), that then I will fund the organization for A/2 and they will fund the organization for B/2, for a total funding of halfway between A and B.
So in such a situation, if I heard that another funder had taken an organization I had already funded for the full amount of A, to the full of level B, then I think it’s not unreasonably for me to reduce my excess funding by half and make sure the organization doesn’t have more than (A/2 + B/2) funding.
However, fully funging against incoming funds seems quite bad and creates really annoying fundraising dynamics.
After OpenPhil promised them a grant but before it was paid out, this same project also got a promise of funding from Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF).
I very much agree Open Phil breaking a promise to provide funding would be bad. However, I assume Open Phil asked about alternative sources of funding in the application, and I wonder whether the promise to provide funding was conditional on the other sources not being successful.
From the linked report:
Here’s a story I recently heard from someone I trust:
An AI Safety project got their grant application approved by OpenPhil, but still had more room for funding. After OpenPhil promised them a grant but before it was paid out, this same project also got a promise of funding from Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). When OpenPhil found out about this, they rolled back the amount of money the would pay to this project, buy the exact amount that this project was promised by SFF, rendering the SFF grant meaningless.
I don’t think this is ok behaviour, and definitely not what you do to get more funders involved.
Is some context I’m missing here? Or has there been some misunderstanding? Or is this as bad as it looks?
I’m not going to name either the source or the project publicly (they can name themselves if they want to), since I don’t want to get anyone else in to trouble, or risk their chances of getting OpenPhil funding. I also want to make clear that I’m writing this on my own initiativ.
There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all, and I think this sort of things are worth calling out.
Edit: I’ve partly misunderstood what happened. See comment below for clarification. My apologies.
I misunderstood the order of events, which does change the story in important ways. The way OpenPhil handled this is not ideal for encouraging other funders, but there were no broken promises.
I apologise and I will try to be more careful in the future.
One reason I was too quick on this is that I am concerned about the dynamics that come with having a single overwhelmingly dominant donor in AI Safety (and other EA cause areas), which I don’t think is healthy for the field. But this situation is not OpenPhils fault.
Below the story from someone who was involved. They have asked to stay anonymous, please respect this.
[I work at Open Philanthropy] Hi Linda–-- thanks for flagging this. After checking internally, I’m not sure what project you’re referring to here; generally speaking, I agree with you/others in this thread that it’s not good to fully funge against incoming funds from other grantmakers in the space after agreeing to fund something, but I’d want to have more context on the specifics of the situation.
It totally makes sense that you don’t want to name the source or project, but if you or your source would feel comfortable sharing more information, feel free to DM me or ask your source to DM me (or use Open Phil’s anonymous feedback form). (And just to flag explicitly, we would/do really appreciate this kind of feedback.)
I’ve asked for more information and will share what I find, as long as I have permission to do so.
Flagging that I have also heard about this case.
Without any context on this situation, I can totally imagine worlds where this is reasonable behaviour, though perhaps poorly communicated, especially if SFF didn’t know they had OpenPhil funding. I personally had a grant from OpenPhil approved for X, but in the meantime had another grantmaker give me a smaller grant for y < X, and OpenPhil agreed to instead fund me for X—y, which I thought was extremely reasonable.
In theory, you can imagine OpenPhil wanting to fund their “fair share” of a project, evenly split across all other interested grantmakers. But it seems harmful and inefficient to wait for other grantmakers to confirm or deny, so “I’ll give you 100%, but lower that to 50% if another grantmaker is later willing to go in as well” seems a more efficient version.
I can also imagine that they eg think a project is good if funded up to $100K, but worse if funded up to $200K (eg that they’d try to scale too fast, as has happened with multiple AI Safety projects that I know of!). If OpenPhil funds $100K, and the counterfactual is $0, that’s a good grant. But if SFF also provides $100K, that totally changes the terms, and now OpenPhil’s grant is actively negative (from their perspective).
I don’t know what the right social norms here are, and I can see various bad effects on the ecosystem from this behaviour in general—incentivising grantees to be dishonest about whether they have other funding, disincentivising other grantmakers from funding anything they think OpenPhil might fund, etc. I think Habryka’s suggestion of funging, but not to 100% seems reasonable and probably better to me.
Thanks for sharing.
What the other grantmaker (the one who gave your y) though of this?
Where they aware of your OpenPhil grant when they offered you funding?
Did OpenPhil role back your grant because you did not have use for more than X or some other reason?
I got the OpenPhil grant only after the other grant went through (and wasn’t thinking much about OpenPhil when I applied for the other grant). I never thought to inform the other grant maker after I got the OpenPhil grant, which maybe I should have in hindsight out of courtesy?
This was covering some salary for a fixed period of research, partially retroactive, after an FTX grant fell through. So I guess I didn’t have use for more than X, in some sense (I’m always happy to be paid a higher salary! But I wouldn’t have worked for a longer period of time, so I would have felt a bit weird about the situation)
Given the order of things, and the fact that you did not have use for more money, this seems indeed reasonable. Thanks for the clarification.
I understand posting this here, but for following up specific cases like this, especially second hand I think it’s better to first contact OpenPhil before airing it publicly. Like you mentioned there is likely to be much context here we don’t have, and it’s hard to have a public discussion without most of the context.
“There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all”
That’s a fair comment I understand the importance of overcoming the bent toward inaction, but I feel like even sending this exact message you posted here to OpenPhil first might have been a better start to the conversation.
And even if it was to be posted, I think it may be better to come from the people directly involved Even if pseudo anonymously (open Phil would know who it was probably) rather than a third party.
I say this with fairly low confidence. I appreciate the benefits of transparency as well and I appreciate overcoming the inertia of doing nothing as well, which I agree is probably worse.
Thanks for the comment, Nick!
I tend to agree. At least based on my experience, people at OP are reasonably responsive. Here are my success rates privately contacting people at OP[1] (“successful attempts[2]”/”attempts[3]”):
All: 52.4 % (22/42).
Aaron Gertler: 100 % (1/1).
Ajeya Cotra: 0 (0/1).
Andrew Snyder-Beattie: 100 % (1/1).
Alexander Berger: 20 % (1/5).
Ben Stewart: 100 % (1/1).
Cash Callaghan: 0 (0/1).
Claire Zabel: 0 (0/3).
Damon Binder: 0 (0/3).
Derek Hopf: 100 % (2/2).
Harshdeep Singh: 0 (0/1).
Heather Youngs: 0 (0/2).
Holden Karnofsky: 100 % (3/3).
Howie Lempel: 100 % (1/1).
Jacob Trefethen: 0 (0/1).
James Snowden: 0 (0/1).
Jason Schukraft: 100 % (2/2).
Lewis Bollard: 80 % (4/5).
Luca Righetti: 100 % (2/2).
Luke Muehlhauser: 0 (0/1).
Matt Clancy: 0 (0/1).
Philip Zealley: 100 % (1/1).
Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan: 100 % (1/1).
Will Sorflaten: 100 % (2/2).
Last updated on 22 April 2024.
At least 1 reply.
Counting as a single attempt multiple ones respecting the same topic.
There are benefit of having this discussion in public, regardless of how responsive OpenPhil staff are.
By posting this publicly I already found out that they did the same to Neal Nanda. Neal though that in his case he though this was “extremely reasonable”. I’m not sure why and I’ve just asked some follow up questions.
I get from your response that you think 45% is good response record, but that depends on how you look at it. In the reference class of major grantmakers it’s not bad, and don’t think OpenPhil is dong something wrong for not responding to more email. They have other important work to do. But, I also have other important work to do. I’m also not doing anything wrong by not spending extra time figuring out who at their staff to contact and send a private email, which according to your data, has a 55% chance ending up ignored.
I agree. I was not clear. I meant that, for this case, I think “public criticism after private criticism” > “public criticism before private criticism” > “public criticism without private criticism” > “private criticism without public criticism”. So I am glad you commented if the alternative was no comment at all.
Yes, I would say the response rate is good enough to justify getting in touch (unless we are talking about people who consistently did not reply to past emails). At the same time, I actually think people at Open Phil might be doing something wrong by not replying to some of my emails assuming they read them, because it is possible to reply to an email in 10 s. For example, by saying something like “Thanks. Sorry, but I do not plan to look into this.”. I guess people assume this is as bad or worse than no reply, but I would rather have a short reply, so I suppose I should clarify this in future emails.
If this was for any substantial amount of money I think it would be pretty bad, though it depends on the relative size of the OP grants and SFF grants.
I think most of the time you should just let promised funding be promised funding, but there is a real and difficult coordination problem here. The general rule I follow when I have been a recommender on the SFF or Lightspeed Grants has been that when I am coordinating with another funder, and we both give X dollars a year but want to fund the organization to different levels (let’s call them level A for me and level B for them), that then I will fund the organization for A/2 and they will fund the organization for B/2, for a total funding of halfway between A and B.
So in such a situation, if I heard that another funder had taken an organization I had already funded for the full amount of A, to the full of level B, then I think it’s not unreasonably for me to reduce my excess funding by half and make sure the organization doesn’t have more than (A/2 + B/2) funding.
However, fully funging against incoming funds seems quite bad and creates really annoying fundraising dynamics.
Thanks for sharing, Linda!
I very much agree Open Phil breaking a promise to provide funding would be bad. However, I assume Open Phil asked about alternative sources of funding in the application, and I wonder whether the promise to provide funding was conditional on the other sources not being successful.