What fraction of the best projects that you currently can’t fund has applied for funding from OpenPhilantropy directly? Reading this it seems that many would qualify.
Why doesn’t OpenPhilantropy fund these hyper-promising projects if, as one grantmaker writes, they are “among the best historical grant opportunities in the time that I have been active as a grantmaker?” OpenPhilantropy writes that LTFF “supported projects we often thought seemed valuable but didn’t encounter ourselves.” But since the chair of the LTFF is now a Senior Program Associate at OpenPhilantropy, I assume that this does not apply to existing funding opportunities.
I have many disagreements with the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy, so some divergence here is to be expected.
Separately, my sense is Open Phil really isn’t set up to deal with the grant volume that the LTFF is dealing with, in addition to its existing grantmaking. My current guess is that the Open Phil longtermist community building team makes like 350-450 grants a year, in total, with 7-8 full-time staff [edit: previously said 50-100 grants on 3-4 staff, because I forgot about half of the team, I am sorry. I also clarified that I was referring to the Open Phil longtermist community building team, not the whole longtermist part]. The LTFF makes ~250 grants per year, on around 1.5 full-time equivalents, which, if Open Phil were to try to take them on additionally, would require more staff capacity than they have available.
Also, Open Phil already has been having a good amount of trouble getting back to their current grantees in a timely manner, at least based on conversations I’ve had with various OP grantees, so I don’t think there is a way Open Phil could fill the relevant grant opportunities, without just directly making a large grant to the LTFF (and also, honestly, the LTFF itself isn’t that well set-up to take advantage of the opportunities that are presenting themselves to us, given our very limited staff capacity and even longer response times, hence my endorsement for a somewhat modest but not huge amount of funding).
I currently expect the default thing that would happen if most of our grantees were to apply to Open Phil is that Open Phil either wouldn’t get back to them for many months, or they would get a response quickly saying that Open Phil doesn’t have time to evaluate their grant request, but that they are encouraged to apply to other grantmakers like the LTFF [edit: or they might fund a small fraction of these new applications and reject the rest, though my guess is Open Phil would prefer to refer them to us on the margin].
I suspect your figures for Open Phil are pretty off on both the scale of people and the scale of the number of grants. I would guess (only counting people with direct grantmaking authority) OP longtermism would have:
5-6 people on Claire’s team (longtermist CB)
1-2 people on alignment
(Yes, this feels shockingly low to me as well)
2-5 people on biosecurity
3-6 people on AI governance
probably other people I’m missing
Also looking at their website, it looks like there’s a lag for when grants are reported (similar to us) but before May 2023, there appears to be 10-20 public grants reported per month (just looking at their grants database and filtering on longtermism). I don’t know how many non-public grants they give out but I’d guess it’s ~10-40% of the total.
First order, I think it’s reasonable to think that OP roughly gives out a similar number of grants to us but at 10-20 times the dollar amount per grant.
This is not accounting for how some programs that OP would classify as a single program would be counted as multiple grants by our ontology, e.g. Century Fellowship.
Sorry, I meant to just refer to the Open Phil longtermist community building team, which felt like the team that would most likely be able to take over some of the grant load, and I know much less about the other teams. Edited to correct that.
Agree that I underestimated things here. Agree that OP grants are vastly larger, which makes up a amount of the difference in grant-capacity per staff. Also additionally the case that OP seems particularly low on AI Alignment grant capacity, which is where most of the grants that I am most excited about would fall into, which formed a bunch of my aggregate impression.
Empirically, I’ve observed some but not huge amounts of overlap between higher-rated applicants to the LTFF and applicants to Open Philanthropy’s programs; I’d estimate around 10%. And my guess is the “best historical grant opportunities” that Habryka is referring to[1] are largely in object-level AI safety work, which Open Philanthropy doesn’t have any open applications for right now (though it’s still funding individuals and research groups sourced through other means, and I think it may fund some of the MATS scholars in particular).
More broadly, many grantmakers at Open Philanthropy (including myself, and Ajeya, who is currently the only person full-time on technical AI safety grantmaking), are currently extremely capacity-constrained, so I wouldn’t make strong inferences that a given project isn’t cost-effective purely on the basis that Open Philanthropy hasn’t already funded it.
I don’t know exactly which grants this refers to and haven’t looked at our current highest-rated grants in-depth; I’m not intending to imply that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with Habryka’s statement.
Thank you for the detailed reply, that seems surprisingly little, I hope more apply.
Also really glad to hear that OP may fund some of the MATS scholars, as the original post mentioned that “some of [the unusual funding constrain] is caused by a large number of participants of the SERI MATS program applying for funding to continue the research they started during the program, and those applications are both highly time-sensitive and of higher-than-usual quality”.
Thank you again for taking the time to reply given the extreme capacity constrains
OpenPhilantropy writes that LTFF “supported projects we often thought seemed valuable but didn’t encounter ourselves.” But since the chair of the LTFF is now a Senior Program Associate at OpenPhilantropy, I assume that this does not apply to existing funding opportunities.
Having a chair who works at Open Phil has helped less than one might naively think. My impression is that Open Phil doesn’t want to commit to evaluating LTFF applications that the LTFF thinks are good but doesn’t have the ability to fund. We are working out how to more systematically share applications going forward in a way that doesn’t create an obligation for Open Phil to evaluate them (or the impression that Open Phil has this obligation to the public), but I think that this will look more like Open Phil having the option to look at some grant applications we think are good, as opposed to Open Phil actually checking every application that we share with them.
What fraction of the best projects that you currently can’t fund has applied for funding from OpenPhilantropy directly? Reading this it seems that many would qualify.
Why doesn’t OpenPhilantropy fund these hyper-promising projects if, as one grantmaker writes, they are “among the best historical grant opportunities in the time that I have been active as a grantmaker?” OpenPhilantropy writes that LTFF “supported projects we often thought seemed valuable but didn’t encounter ourselves.” But since the chair of the LTFF is now a Senior Program Associate at OpenPhilantropy, I assume that this does not apply to existing funding opportunities.
I have many disagreements with the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy, so some divergence here is to be expected.
Separately, my sense is Open Phil really isn’t set up to deal with the grant volume that the LTFF is dealing with, in addition to its existing grantmaking. My current guess is that the Open Phil longtermist community building team makes like 350-450 grants a year, in total, with 7-8 full-time staff [edit: previously said 50-100 grants on 3-4 staff, because I forgot about half of the team, I am sorry. I also clarified that I was referring to the Open Phil longtermist community building team, not the whole longtermist part]. The LTFF makes ~250 grants per year, on around 1.5 full-time equivalents, which, if Open Phil were to try to take them on additionally, would require more staff capacity than they have available.
Also, Open Phil already has been having a good amount of trouble getting back to their current grantees in a timely manner, at least based on conversations I’ve had with various OP grantees, so I don’t think there is a way Open Phil could fill the relevant grant opportunities, without just directly making a large grant to the LTFF (and also, honestly, the LTFF itself isn’t that well set-up to take advantage of the opportunities that are presenting themselves to us, given our very limited staff capacity and even longer response times, hence my endorsement for a somewhat modest but not huge amount of funding).
I currently expect the default thing that would happen if most of our grantees were to apply to Open Phil is that Open Phil either wouldn’t get back to them for many months, or they would get a response quickly saying that Open Phil doesn’t have time to evaluate their grant request, but that they are encouraged to apply to other grantmakers like the LTFF [edit: or they might fund a small fraction of these new applications and reject the rest, though my guess is Open Phil would prefer to refer them to us on the margin].
I suspect your figures for Open Phil are pretty off on both the scale of people and the scale of the number of grants. I would guess (only counting people with direct grantmaking authority) OP longtermism would have:
5-6 people on Claire’s team (longtermist CB)
1-2 people on alignment
(Yes, this feels shockingly low to me as well)
2-5 people on biosecurity
3-6 people on AI governance
probably other people I’m missing
Also looking at their website, it looks like there’s a lag for when grants are reported (similar to us) but before May 2023, there appears to be 10-20 public grants reported per month (just looking at their grants database and filtering on longtermism). I don’t know how many non-public grants they give out but I’d guess it’s ~10-40% of the total.
First order, I think it’s reasonable to think that OP roughly gives out a similar number of grants to us but at 10-20 times the dollar amount per grant.
This is not accounting for how some programs that OP would classify as a single program would be counted as multiple grants by our ontology, e.g. Century Fellowship.
Sorry, I meant to just refer to the Open Phil longtermist community building team, which felt like the team that would most likely be able to take over some of the grant load, and I know much less about the other teams. Edited to correct that.
Agree that I underestimated things here. Agree that OP grants are vastly larger, which makes up a amount of the difference in grant-capacity per staff. Also additionally the case that OP seems particularly low on AI Alignment grant capacity, which is where most of the grants that I am most excited about would fall into, which formed a bunch of my aggregate impression.
[Speaking for myself, not Open Philanthropy]
Empirically, I’ve observed some but not huge amounts of overlap between higher-rated applicants to the LTFF and applicants to Open Philanthropy’s programs; I’d estimate around 10%. And my guess is the “best historical grant opportunities” that Habryka is referring to[1] are largely in object-level AI safety work, which Open Philanthropy doesn’t have any open applications for right now (though it’s still funding individuals and research groups sourced through other means, and I think it may fund some of the MATS scholars in particular).
More broadly, many grantmakers at Open Philanthropy (including myself, and Ajeya, who is currently the only person full-time on technical AI safety grantmaking), are currently extremely capacity-constrained, so I wouldn’t make strong inferences that a given project isn’t cost-effective purely on the basis that Open Philanthropy hasn’t already funded it.
I don’t know exactly which grants this refers to and haven’t looked at our current highest-rated grants in-depth; I’m not intending to imply that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with Habryka’s statement.
Thank you for the detailed reply, that seems surprisingly little, I hope more apply.
Also really glad to hear that OP may fund some of the MATS scholars, as the original post mentioned that “some of [the unusual funding constrain] is caused by a large number of participants of the SERI MATS program applying for funding to continue the research they started during the program, and those applications are both highly time-sensitive and of higher-than-usual quality”.
Thank you again for taking the time to reply given the extreme capacity constrains
Responding specifically to
Having a chair who works at Open Phil has helped less than one might naively think. My impression is that Open Phil doesn’t want to commit to evaluating LTFF applications that the LTFF thinks are good but doesn’t have the ability to fund. We are working out how to more systematically share applications going forward in a way that doesn’t create an obligation for Open Phil to evaluate them (or the impression that Open Phil has this obligation to the public), but I think that this will look more like Open Phil having the option to look at some grant applications we think are good, as opposed to Open Phil actually checking every application that we share with them.