A bit sad to find out that Open Philanthropy’s (now Coefficient Giving) GCR Cause Prioritization team is no more.
I heard it was removed/restructured mid-2025. Seems like most of the people were distributed to other parts of the org. I don’t think there were public announcements of this, though it is quite possible I missed something.
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren’t yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
There don’t seem to be many active online artifacts about this team, but I found this hiring post from early 2024, and this previous AMA.
Thanks for flagging this, Ozzie. I led the GCR Cause Prio team for the last year before it was wound down, so I can add some context.
The honest summary is that the team never really achieved product-market fit. Despite the name, we weren’t really doing “cause prioritization” as most people would conceive of it. GCR program teams have wide remits within their areas and more domain expertise and networks than we had, so the separate cause prio team model didn’t work as well as it does for GHW, where it’s more fruitful to dig into new literatures and build quantitative models. In practice, our work ended up being a mix of supporting a variety of projects for different program teams and trying to improve grant evaluation methods. GCR leadership felt that this set-up wasn’t on track to answer their most important strategy and research questions and that it wasn’t worth the opportunity cost of the people on the team. GCR leadership are considering alternative paths forward, though haven’t decided on anything yet.
I don’t think there are any other comparably major structural changes at Coefficient to flag, other than that we’re trying to scale Good Ventures’ giving and work with other partners, as described in our name change announcement post. I’ll also note that the Worldview Investigation team also wound down in H2, although that case was because team members left for other high-impact roles (e.g. Joe) and not through a top-down decision. This means that there’s no longer much dedicated pure research capacity within GCR, though grantmaking here is fairly contiguous with research in practice.
Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil’s GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don’t seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren’t yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative?
I don’t mean to sound too negative on this—I did just say “a bit sad” on that one specific point.
Do I think that CE is doing worse or better overall? It seems like Coefficient has been making a bunch of changes, and I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the details. They’ve also been expanding a fair bit. I’d naively assume that a huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes to hire and grow, and that this is putting CE in a better place on average.
I would expect this (the GCR prio team change) to be some evidence that specific ambitious approaches to GCR prioritization are more limited now. I think there are a bunch of large projects that could be done in this area that would probably take a team to do well, and right now it’s not clear who else could do such projects.
Bigger-picture, I personally think GCR prioritization/strategy is under-investigated, but I respect that others have different priorities.
A bit sad to find out that Open Philanthropy’s (now Coefficient Giving) GCR Cause Prioritization team is no more.
I heard it was removed/restructured mid-2025. Seems like most of the people were distributed to other parts of the org. I don’t think there were public announcements of this, though it is quite possible I missed something.
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren’t yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
There don’t seem to be many active online artifacts about this team, but I found this hiring post from early 2024, and this previous AMA.
Thanks for flagging this, Ozzie. I led the GCR Cause Prio team for the last year before it was wound down, so I can add some context.
The honest summary is that the team never really achieved product-market fit. Despite the name, we weren’t really doing “cause prioritization” as most people would conceive of it. GCR program teams have wide remits within their areas and more domain expertise and networks than we had, so the separate cause prio team model didn’t work as well as it does for GHW, where it’s more fruitful to dig into new literatures and build quantitative models. In practice, our work ended up being a mix of supporting a variety of projects for different program teams and trying to improve grant evaluation methods. GCR leadership felt that this set-up wasn’t on track to answer their most important strategy and research questions and that it wasn’t worth the opportunity cost of the people on the team. GCR leadership are considering alternative paths forward, though haven’t decided on anything yet.
I don’t think there are any other comparably major structural changes at Coefficient to flag, other than that we’re trying to scale Good Ventures’ giving and work with other partners, as described in our name change announcement post. I’ll also note that the Worldview Investigation team also wound down in H2, although that case was because team members left for other high-impact roles (e.g. Joe) and not through a top-down decision. This means that there’s no longer much dedicated pure research capacity within GCR, though grantmaking here is fairly contiguous with research in practice.
Thanks so much for this response! That’s really useful to know. I really appreciate the transparency and clarity here.
Hope that the team members of it are all doing well now.
Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil’s GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don’t seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?
What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative?
I don’t mean to sound too negative on this—I did just say “a bit sad” on that one specific point.
Do I think that CE is doing worse or better overall? It seems like Coefficient has been making a bunch of changes, and I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the details. They’ve also been expanding a fair bit. I’d naively assume that a huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes to hire and grow, and that this is putting CE in a better place on average.
I would expect this (the GCR prio team change) to be some evidence that specific ambitious approaches to GCR prioritization are more limited now. I think there are a bunch of large projects that could be done in this area that would probably take a team to do well, and right now it’s not clear who else could do such projects.
Bigger-picture, I personally think GCR prioritization/strategy is under-investigated, but I respect that others have different priorities.