Are there any plans to fundraise from high net-worth individuals, companies or governments? If so, does LTFF have the capacity/expertise for this? And what would be the plan beyond donations through the donation link you shared in the post?
We do have some plans to fundraise from high net-worth individuals, including doing very basic nonprofit things like offering to chat with some of our biggest past donors, as well as more ambitious targets like actively sourcing and reaching out to HNWs who have (eg) expressed concerns about AGI x-risk/GCRs but have never gotten around to actually donating to any AI x-safety projects. I don’t know if we have the expertise for this, to some degree this is an empirical question.
We have no current plans to raise money from companies, governments, or (non-OP) large foundations.
I haven’t thought about this much at all, but my current weakly-held stance is that I think a longtermist grantmaking organization is just a pretty odd project for governments and foundations to regrant to. I’d be more optimistic about fundraising and grantwriting efforts from organizations which are larger and have an easier-to-explain direct impact case: ARC, Redwood, FAR, CHAI, MIRI(?), etc.
I think raising money from companies is relatively much more tractable. But before we were to go down that route, I’d need to think a bit more about effects on moral licensing, safetywashing, etc. I don’t want to (eg) receive money from Microsoft or OpenAI now on the grounds that it’s better for us to have money to spend on safety than for them to spend such $s on capabilities, and then in a few years regret the decision because the nebulous costs of being tied with AI companies [1]ended up being much higher than I initially modeled.
One advantage of our current ignorance re:donors is that fund managers basically can’t be explicitly or subtly pressured to Goodhart on donor preferences, simply because we don’t actually know what donor preferences are (and in some cases don’t even know who the donors are).
On LessWrong, jacquesthibs asks:
We do have some plans to fundraise from high net-worth individuals, including doing very basic nonprofit things like offering to chat with some of our biggest past donors, as well as more ambitious targets like actively sourcing and reaching out to HNWs who have (eg) expressed concerns about AGI x-risk/GCRs but have never gotten around to actually donating to any AI x-safety projects. I don’t know if we have the expertise for this, to some degree this is an empirical question.
We have no current plans to raise money from companies, governments, or (non-OP) large foundations.
I haven’t thought about this much at all, but my current weakly-held stance is that I think a longtermist grantmaking organization is just a pretty odd project for governments and foundations to regrant to. I’d be more optimistic about fundraising and grantwriting efforts from organizations which are larger and have an easier-to-explain direct impact case: ARC, Redwood, FAR, CHAI, MIRI(?), etc.
I think raising money from companies is relatively much more tractable. But before we were to go down that route, I’d need to think a bit more about effects on moral licensing, safetywashing, etc. I don’t want to (eg) receive money from Microsoft or OpenAI now on the grounds that it’s better for us to have money to spend on safety than for them to spend such $s on capabilities, and then in a few years regret the decision because the nebulous costs of being tied with AI companies [1]ended up being much higher than I initially modeled.
One advantage of our current ignorance re:donors is that fund managers basically can’t be explicitly or subtly pressured to Goodhart on donor preferences, simply because we don’t actually know what donor preferences are (and in some cases don’t even know who the donors are).