Hey there, I’m Austin, currently running https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com!
Austin
Karma: 4,495
I included this story as a short anecdote about Marcus’s ability to spot talent, make active investments, and convince founders to take the leap, all of which I expect to transfer into helping start great AI x Animal orgs. I understand that different people in EA/AI safety have different takes about whether Mechanize specifically is good or bad—I happen to think good or at least neutral.
(And I take responsibility for any factual errors with this specific anecdote. Talking to Marcus just now, it seems like his main nudge was to convince Ege/Matthew/Tamay that the nonprofit structure was wrong for what they wanted to accomplish.)
Manifund’s Falcon Fund
At Manifold we talked a lot about what kinds of markets/verticals to focus on and were always aware that sports gambling is a big demographic, while mostly choosing to stay out, partly for ideological reasons (not interesting to us), partly because we weren’t positioned for it.
I don’t think we registered a specific concrete prediction to this effect, but eg in our 2022 seed round memo (~4 months after we were founded) we called out Betfair and Draftkings as the largest available markets.
yup!
Would recommend paragraphs, as I think they read better. (Do as I say, not as I do!)
See also https://dynomight.substack.com/p/formatting
Manifund Essay Prize: on EA funding, the SF scene, and forecasting
Rented Virtue, by Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi
Very much agreed, though I’m guilty for not having done this myself; hope to fix this soon!
Two other donation writeups I really liked:
@richard_ngo on his 2025 giving strategy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=rxSTSbZugfTZ3tCuc
@Joel Becker on his experience regranting in 2022: https://joel-becker.com/digital-garden/regrantor/
There are maybe 30 to 60 people in the world doing AI safety grantmaking, collectively directing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Soon, there will be >$1B being directed per year, and potentially multiple billions.
I like this framing for the botecs it encourages!
Currently it seems like each grantmaker is (on average) responsible for ~$10m/y. One question I think about sometimes: how will # of grantmakers scale as more $ go towards AI safety funding? If funding is eg 3x’ing year-over-year, it’s unclear whether we’re currently training up that number of grantmakers.
Another question might be: what is a good ratio of # of grantmakers to # of direct work? I’d ballpark there to be ~1000 fulltime AIS direct workers; does a 20:1 ratio seem high, low, or just right?
I’d be curious to look at comparisons for scaled funding ecosystems for a reference class; I’m primarily thinking VCs & angels, but perhaps others eg academic funding are also appropriate.
It’s a separate event run by CEA, which, in contrast to EAG, is much smaller and just for leaders in the field of xrisk. (I haven’t been, but my wife attended this 2026 edition)
I’m hiring for a variety of roles, which are mostly operational/community-shaped:
Mox is the largest AI Safety community space in San Francisco. We’re fundraising!
Hm, as a “helpful” react-er, I was trying to communicate both “thanks for engaging” and “I have seen this”; I recognize that it’s hard for org leaders to weigh in on things in detail, so I simultaneously appreciate Zach saying anything at all, and wish he or someone else could elaborate (as, I suppose, I and Oli replied with at the time below).
Mostly I wasn’t thinking that much about norms for reacts, idk
Thanks for the post! It seems like CEA and EA Funds are the only entities left housed under EV (per the EV website); if that’s the case, why bother spinning out at all?
Aerodrop: far-UVC lamp giveaway
To be clear, “10 new OpenPhils” is trying to convey like, a gestalt or a vibe; how I expect the feeling of working within EA causes to change, rather than a rigorous point estimate
Though, I’d be willing to bet at even odds, something like “yearly EA giving exceeds $10B by end of 2031”, which is about 10x the largest year per https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NWHb4nsnXRxDDFGLy/historical-ea-funding-data-2025-update.
Some factors that could raise giving estimates:
The 3:1 match
If “6%” is more like “15%”
Future growth of Anthropic stock
Differing priorities and timelines (ie focus on TAI) among Ants
Also, the Anthropic situation seems like it’ll be different than Dustin in that the number of individual donors (“principals”) goes up a lot—which I’m guessing leads to more grants at smaller sizes, rather than OpenPhil’s (relatively) few, giant grants
Appreciate the shoutout! Some thoughts:
Anthropic’s been lately valued at $350b; if we estimate that eg 6% of that is in the form of equity allocated to employees, that’s $21B between the ~3000 they currently have, or an average of $7m/employee.
I think 6% is somewhat conservative and wouldn’t be surprised if it were more like 12-20%
Early employees have much (OOMs) more equity than new hires. Here’s one estimated generated by Claude and I:
Even after discounting for standard vesting terms (4 years), % of EAs, and % allocated to charity, that’s still mindboggling amounts of money. I’d guess that this is more like “10 new OpenPhils in the next 2-6 years”
I heard about the IPO rumors at the same time as everyone else (ie very recently), but for the last 6 months or so, the expectation was that Anthropic might have a ~yearly liquidity event, where Anthropic or some other buyer buys back employee stock up to some cap ($2m was thrown around as a figure)
As reported in other places, early Anthropic employees were offered a 3:1 match of donations of equity, iirc up to 50% of their total stock grant? New employees now are offered 1:1 match, but the 3:1 holds for the early ones (though not cofounders)
Thanks for asking!
My strong default prior is that most forprofits are good for the world, along the standard arguments: gains from trade, Paul Graham on wealth, the finding that corporations only keep 2.2% of value created
Moreover, I like when people who share my values start valuable companies, because they often spend that money on projects that are good. Mechanize doesn’t seem that different than Asana, or maybe Microsoft in this regard. Tamay has taken the GWWC pledge; I find Matthew’s writing (eg on AI rights) very informative.
Object-level, it seems like Mechanize mostly sells good code RL environments to Anthropic. Across the community, opinions on accelerating Anthropic capabilities are also mixed, but on balance I lean pro.
I personally benefit a lot from the good coding capabilities that Claude Code provides. This stage of AI/LLM development seems broadly good to me.
(Nb, my view wouldn’t change if they were mostly selling to OpenAI or GDM or something.)
On minor level, some people view that leaving Epoch was somehow a betrayal of Epoch or the funding they received; this seems quite fake. I strongly support individuals’ rights to branch out and start new orgs. In any case, it seems like Epoch has continued to do well.