I lead Forethought: we research how to navigate the transition to superintelligent AI, and then help people to address the issues we identify.
I think we might soon be funding constrained, in the sense that we’ll have more people that we’d like to hire than funding to hire them. (We’re currently in the middle of a hiring round. While we’re still evaluating candidates, we’ve been pleasantly pleased with our applicant pool, and we think that we might want to end up making offers to (or offering grants to) more people than we can currently fund.) If we end up in this situation, I think that marginal funding would (in expectation) lead to more good macrostrategy research.
You can see a bit more about the case for donating, budget, impact to date, and plans on our donate page and our 2025 fundraiser page. You can donate here.
Donations are tax-deductible for donors in the US, UK and the Netherlands. For more details on donation methods and tax-deductibility, see here.
Some quick FAQs:
Why haven’t other funders picked this up?
Forethought has been evaluated and endorsed by Longview Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), who are pitching us to donors in their network.
Our work is pretty unusual, which means we’re mostly trying to raise money from highly-aligned private donors, who are not giving at a scale where they can easily fill our funding gap.
That said, some of this information is new, so our current donors might be willing to give more, and new donors might chip in. You could be a part of that, though!
As mentioned, Forethought has been endorsed by both Longview and by Coefficient Giving. We also have some testimonials on our donate page, and I think most people who’ve seriously engaged with our work think it’s adding something.
But while I think this is a good bet, it’s a high variance bet: we’re a relatively early-stage organization, our research is quite hits-based, and I think it’s pretty unclear how to BOTEC our work. Additionally, we’re looking for fairly unrestricted support, and our research focuses might change over time.
I’m happy to respond to questions in the comments!
Forethought has room for more funding
I lead Forethought: we research how to navigate the transition to superintelligent AI, and then help people to address the issues we identify.
I think we might soon be funding constrained, in the sense that we’ll have more people that we’d like to hire than funding to hire them. (We’re currently in the middle of a hiring round. While we’re still evaluating candidates, we’ve been pleasantly pleased with our applicant pool, and we think that we might want to end up making offers to (or offering grants to) more people than we can currently fund.) If we end up in this situation, I think that marginal funding would (in expectation) lead to more good macrostrategy research.
You can see a bit more about the case for donating, budget, impact to date, and plans on our donate page and our 2025 fundraiser page. You can donate here.
Donations are tax-deductible for donors in the US, UK and the Netherlands. For more details on donation methods and tax-deductibility, see here.
Some quick FAQs:
Why haven’t other funders picked this up?
Forethought has been evaluated and endorsed by Longview Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), who are pitching us to donors in their network.
Our work is pretty unusual, which means we’re mostly trying to raise money from highly-aligned private donors, who are not giving at a scale where they can easily fill our funding gap.
That said, some of this information is new, so our current donors might be willing to give more, and new donors might chip in. You could be a part of that, though!
What sort of opportunity is this?
I think that this style of work has a strong track record.
I think we have a good team and we have made some significant research progress as well as influenced some important decisions.
As mentioned, Forethought has been endorsed by both Longview and by Coefficient Giving. We also have some testimonials on our donate page, and I think most people who’ve seriously engaged with our work think it’s adding something.
But while I think this is a good bet, it’s a high variance bet: we’re a relatively early-stage organization, our research is quite hits-based, and I think it’s pretty unclear how to BOTEC our work. Additionally, we’re looking for fairly unrestricted support, and our research focuses might change over time.
I’m happy to respond to questions in the comments!