I think it’d be good to briefly discuss the distinction between RFPs, prizes, impact certificates, regular grantmaking, and maybe hiring, and the pros and cons of RFPs relative to those things.

Kat Woods writes:

RFPs are a bit like job ads for organizations, usually for contract work. Instead of hiring an individual for a job, an RFP is put out to hire an organization or individual for a contract, and there’s much less management overhead than if the project was done in-house. (If you’d like a more detailed explanation of how they work, please see Appendix A.)

The reason why RFPs are amazing is that they fix an underlying problem with most grantmaking: you can make an idea happen even if nobody is currently working on it.

Think of it from the perspective of a large foundation. You’re a program officer there and just had an awesome idea for how to make AI safer. You’re excited. You have tons of resources at your disposal. All you have to do is find an organization that’s doing the idea, then give them oodles of money to scale it up.

The problem is, you look around and find that nobody’s doing it. Or maybe there’s one team doing it, but they’re not very competent, and you worry they’ll do a poor job of it.

Unfortunately for you, you’re out of luck. You could go start it yourself, but you’re in a really high impact role and running a startup wouldn’t be your comparative advantage. In your spare time you could try to convince existing orgs to do the idea, but that’s socially difficult and it’s hard to find the right team who’d be interested. Unfortunately, the usual grantmaking route is limited to choosing from existing organizations and projects.

Now, if you had RFPs in your toolkit, you’d be able to put out an RFP for the idea. You could say, “The Nonlinear Fund is looking to fund people to do this idea. We’ll give up to $200,000 for the right team(s) to do it.” Then people will come.

Values-aligned organizations that might not have known that you were interested in these projects will apply. Individuals who find the idea exciting and high impact will come forward. It will also help spread the idea, since people will know that there’s money and interest in the area.

This is why Nonlinear (1) will do RFPs in addition to the usual grantmaking. This will allow our prioritization research to not be limited to only evaluating existing projects.