Hey there, I’m Austin, currently running https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at austin@manifund.org!
Austin
Karma: 5,096
Okay, unfortunately the EA Forum DM functionality is also broken for me, atm. Could you post a reply with an anonymous email address for me to email the letter to? I’ll email from austin@manifund.org.
Separately, you seem to think the $500k figure is particularly important. Does that mean that, even if we reached a settlement with the FTX estate to return some lower amount, you believe that we ought to return $500k anyways? This is how I interpret your original post, but this seems somewhat unintuitive to me and I’d appreciate you explaining more.
I’ve set up a poll now on Manifold:
(I first tried an EA Forum poll, but 1. it error’d and wouldn’t create, and 2. it doesn’t support multiple choice, just a spectrum agree/disagree, and I couldn’t figure out how to express these options correctly.)
Hi! Thank you very much for writing this. It’s clear that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this subject, are well-informed, and care about doing the right thing. I will aim for a quick response now in the interest of having you & the public understand the current state of things; I might like to do a more thorough/thoughtful response in the future, but will have to balance that against ongoing bandwidth and legal counsel. (I also have a private letter I’ve been circulating about this situation which I’m happy to DM you, provided you don’t share without checking in.)
I am considering a range of options for what to do about the lawsuit. As I’ve previously written, and no doubt you’ve seen:
The $500k was a grant (not investment) from the Future Fund, to fund a program where successful Manifold traders could choose which charities would receive donations: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mbBfFHKEDBTwTSSJX/predicting-for-good-charity-prediction-markets
Manifund ran this program for ~2 years and distributed most of this funding to charities & charitable projects, with the top 3 being Givewell (~$61k), LTFF (~$38k), Rethink Priorities (~$27k). We offered to return remaining funds to the estate; we are still in litigation. This case has been going on for years, and may continue for months at least; litigation takes a while. I do hope to write a retro on this overall program someday.
And then, some context on Manifund’s finances: we’re not an especially rich organization. We’ve never received a grant from CG, or most other philanthropic funders; we’re primarily bootstrapped off of a 5% ops fee when we match projects and donors. As of earlier this month, we held an estimated $6-8m of assets, depending on how you count, but most of it is assigned to various Manifund donor accounts, or subprojects like Frame Fellowship. See https://manifund.org/finances. We estimated our net unrestricted assets at about $400k, which is something like 3-6 months of runway across all of our ongoing projects (primarily due to ongoing burn from operating Mox).
So, I am mostly considering whether I should make a large personal donation to Manifund to help resolve the lawsuit. I do have some money personally, mostly from having worked at Google for a couple years, and then through public stock investments; but, not that much money. Between me and my wife, we have ~$1.6m in liquid assets. (On paper, my Manifold stock might be worth another $1-2m, but for various reasons I think it’s correct to sharply discount that number; for example, the original 3 founders have all left Manifold.) Sometimes, $1.6m feels like a lot, and sometimes, given our 2 kids and the cost of SF, it doesn’t feel like very much. (FWIW, I’ve never taken a salary at Manifund, and at Manifold the founders drew a salary of $80k-$100k, as we were trying to conserve runway.)
Anyhow, I honestly would be pretty open to picking option 2, if it meant that Manifund could work with Caroline in a capacity that is endorsed by the community and the world. (It does depend a bit on Caroline’s own plans too.)
I appreciate your writeup for laying out these considerations. Some of my worry is that even if we return the full amount, most people will continue thinking that they don’t wish to collaborate with Manifund; your post (and, Andy’s?) provide some evidence to the contrary. I think I’ll set up a quick EA Forum poll for others to weigh in on this matter.
Thank you very much for writing this! We’ve integrated Pangram into Manifund, as a flag and visibility filter on projects; on net it’s been very helpful due to the volume of low-quality AI submissions we get through the site. However, I am sympathetic eg to your example of a non-native speaker using AI to get their points across. Recently, I had a back and forth with a Chinese-speaking student on Manifund who started with an AI writing proposal which put me off, but I eventually decided to give him a small grant after more dialogue.
I appreciate your headline statement that Pangram’s 99.9% accuracy is overstated as well, that was a useful update.
(Disclaimer, I’ve also recently made a minor ($10k) personal investment into Pangram.)
Thanks again for writing this, Chris. I’m revisiting this essay right now as part of a reading group my colleague @Jen baik is hosting, so wanted to take the chance to write some reflections:
In general, I think all 5 strands make sense: mass outreach, online community, conference, AIS fundamentals, advising. Overall, “more dakka” seems great. If Mox had more money, we could easily turn up the dial on making these things happen. But beyond this:
I feel like these approaches are still more generic for general AIS/EA fieldbuilding, but the shape of fieldbuilding for SF might be particularly different, because a lot of the people you care about reaching are very busy, have high opportunity costs. They’re Anthropic or OpenAI employees, or maybe city staffers and policy people
Again, the events scene in SF is quite competitive—a lot of excellent parties and socials and talks and mixers and conference bid for people’s time. It’s relatively easy to get any 100 people to show up for a talk, but requires more thinking to get the most relevant 100 people.
I have no idea what’s up with the SF AI policy scene. Surely not all these people hang out in DC. Maybe they’re in CAIS? (Maybe they’re all in Berkeley)
Effective giving and philanthropy, currently, seem quite underserved in SF. Both for the EA-pilled lab employees, and also for sth like “tech CEO who’s taken founder’s pledge”, and a much broader, good ol’ fashioned earning-to-give folks—they seem almost forgotten in the mad rush to have everyone upskill in AIS and/or court the Anthropic $
Also, AI safety founders seem underserved. People keep saying this should be Mox’s competitive advantage, and, maybe it should, but it’s a bit hard to figure out what specific for-profits seem well positioned to do AI safety stuff. I think Geoff Ralston’s Safe AI Fund has mostly pivoted to biosec for this reason? And other AI safety adjacent VCs I know are closing up shop.
Beyond AI safety, emerging tech (biotech/biosec, robotics, fusion etc) seem to do well in SF.
You touch on it already but I also still don’t know what the balance between “AI safety” and “EA overall” fieldbuilding we should invest into. I’m a big tent kinda guy, I guess.
“GiveWell for AI safety” is a subject I’ve discussed a lot for Manifund and have tried to do very very very briefly (see https://manifund.substack.com/p/how-cost-effective-are-ai-safety)
I would love to do more of this ourselves (or, fund someone to do this), but as you mention the talent required for it is scarce. I wish, to start, that CG would just publish their own internal analyses about their $10m+ grants, because I expect they spend a fair amount of their own grantmaker time creating those botecs, and having them published would be so much better than nothing.
Thanks! Cool to see Kaya’s data; I’ve always been proud of pushing Manifold to make its stats page public as well
Can you say more about regulatory hazards in global health, and/or give an example? I’m imagining something like “you publish what you did in a developing country, then the regime changes, and then they notice you did a bunch of things they don’t like, and put you in jail”
Total Safety Transparency?
Come one, come all to the Big Tent on Nov 20-21 at Mox SF
Thank you for the work you do at AIM; it’s long been one of my favorite charities. At our wedding, my wife and I each picked a charity for attendees to donate to in lieu of a wedding gift; my wife picked The Humane League, and I picked the then-Charity Entrepreneurship, now AIM. AIM has also been one of the inspirations for the incubator I now organize, Surplus. Best wishes going forward.
Grace, thank you for the work that you do at EA Australia, and at GWWC previously. I still have fond memories of the EAG talk you gave about the importance of marketing for EA, a subject that I think many people still underrate. And while I haven’t been to Australia myself, again and again I’m impressed by the quality of the impactful work and people, from the land down under; keep it up.
You already mentioned, but I think it’s worth repeating—in my view, the best startups do not take the YC deal anymore. I think partly it’s because YC is a victim of its own success (the startup ecosystem is now much more developed, and other incubators and VCs bid at higher valuations); partly, the brand has fallen somewhat. Also, my guess is that a lot of the best people who would have used to start a startup, now join/start a lab, or sometimes, a nonprofit.
Some startups (and I presume, their incubators) do achieve extraordinary growth due to AI, though. One example is Cursor—a VC recently asked “on a ROI basis, which would it have been better to seed invest into, Anthropic or Cursor?”, and the answer was actually Cursor due to its rapidity of growth + fast acquisition. (And, the incubators such as https://aigrant.com/ are a inspiration for me when thinking about https://surplus.dev/)
Thank you, Zach. I appreciate you speaking up in public on behalf of CEA; CEA and your leadership is particularly important at times of high stress and uncertainty. I think the actions CEA are taking are entirely reasonable.
I also want to note for the general public, that Manifund has been but a minor player within the larger EA ecosystem, on many dimensions. (Quick estimates: Manifund moved ~$10m in a year when EA moved $1-10B; has 2 FTE in a year when EA has 1000-10,000 FTE. I think we were more impressive as a share of seed-stage AI safety projects funded, but, still not even the biggest funder in that space.) We did not expect this hiring decision to represent all of EA, and I appreciate anyone who pushes back on that narrative.
I hope that someday, I, Caroline, and/or Manifund will be able to regain CEA’s trust through our actions. Until then, I wish you the best with your work, and apologize for making your lives harder.
I think I can share that the $500k was a grant (not investment) from the Future Fund, to fund a program where successful Manifold traders could choose which charities would receive donations: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mbBfFHKEDBTwTSSJX/predicting-for-good-charity-prediction-markets
Manifund ran this program for ~2 years and distributed most of this funding to charities & charitable projects, with the top 3 being Givewell (~$61k), LTFF (~$38k), Rethink Priorities (~$27k). We offered to return remaining funds to the estate; we are still in litigation. This case has been going on for years, and may continue for months at least; litigation takes a while. I do hope to write a retro on this overall program someday.
For reference, Lightcone received ~$4.2m from FTX Future Fund and eventually returned ~$1.7m (and then paid some more in legal fees, maybe ~$0.6m): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc/the-lightcone-is-nothing-without-its-people
Ah, to be clear, I don’t wish to take particularly much credit for his outlook change (though, I do believe he eg somewhat reconsidered his outlook on trans people after meeting a trans person at Manifest. I also believe he did meet some EAs which he collaborated more with afterwards); mostly I cite it as an example of prescience
(I wrote this 4 years ago, 2 weeks after FTX had collapsed. My feelings on the subject have changed somewhat, as more information has come to light and I’ve spoken with people involved in the matter, including Caroline herself. I didn’t do a big “What I think about FTX now” post because that seemed like it would just be adding fuel to the fire, for ourselves and for EA. I may write that post sometime in the future, when things have settled down. Also fwiw “What I think about the Future Fund” is more likely as a post.)
Thank you for writing this. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to reply substantively/to all the points, but I appreciate you taking the time to lay out your thinking.
One point I am curious about: you bring up my decision to invite Richard Hanania to Manifest as a parallel to hiring Caroline Ellison. I hadn’t considered the similarity before, but appreciate you pointing it out.
I’m curious if people in this community have updated at all on Richard Hanania based on his track record, because, from where I sit, I feel somewhat vindicated on that specific decision. Since my first time inviting Hanania, he has come out in support of various EA causes including the Shrimp Welfare Project; been referenced by neutral well-known parties for his takes (off the top of my head, Matt Yglesias and Patrick Collison); supported immigration and decried racism; and generally been a strong critic of many of Trump’s actions, which is particularly notable given the relative lack of such criticism from the conservative side of political commentors.
(At the same time, I still find some of his X/Twitter posts more inflammatory and distasteful than I would wish to see in the public discourse.)
I believe I mentioned this verbally with Caroline before making the pledge. I haven’t done this for any other other bloggers and have no intention for doing so.
Thanks for highlighting—to be clear, that was kind of a joke, and a bit of misdirection. (While, also, making a serious statement that I liked Caroline’s blogging and hope to see more of it). I’m glad you saw the humor in it!
We never intended to follow through on having Caroline take any donation from me, of course.
hi! as I’ve posted on X:
and as a quick point of clarification, I’ve returned to working after approximately a week of parental leave.