Would you consider applying to YC?
I imagine it only makes sense for certain types of non-profits, like OWID.
defun 🔸
Karma: 1,133
“Dwarkesh’s fundraiser to fight factory farming has now raised over $1M!”—https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1954962845994819719
Lewis Bollard on Dwarkesh’s podcast:
Bill Gates: “My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth”—https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/n20-years-to-give-away-virtually-all-my-wealth
I’d love to see Joey Savoie on Dwarkesh’s podcast. Can someone make it happen?
Joey with Spencer Greenberg: https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/154/joey-savoie-should-you-become-a-charity-entrepreneur/
I think the pledge hits a sweet spot. It’s not legally binding, so it’s not really a lifelong decision, but being a public commitment helps push people to stick to their altruistic values.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/faq/is-a-giving-pledge-legally-binding
Holden Karnofsky has joined Anthropic (LinkedIn profile). I haven’t been able to find more information.
Anthropic’s Twitter account was hacked. It’s “just” a social media account, but it raises some concerns.
Update: the post has just been deleted. They keep the updates on their status page: https://status.anthropic.com/
Great initiative! 🙌🙌
I’ve been hoping for something like this to exist. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CK7pGbkzdojkFumX9/meta-charity-focused-on-earning-to-give
What do EtGers need?
I’ve been donating 20% of my income for a couple of years, and I’m planning to increase it to 30–40%. I’d love to meet like-minded people: ambitious EAs who are EtG.
Rahi Impact … we expect to launch in May 2025.
Have you considering launching asap (eg. next month)?
I could be wrong, but Rahi Impact seems quite similar to a tech startup, and one of the best pieces of advice for most startups is to launch as soon as possible.
Thank you so much for the context 💛
My raw thoughts (apologies for the low quality):
I think the target audience should be high earners who are already donating >=10% of their income. (Getting people from 0% to 10% would not be in the scope of the charity. I think GWWC is already doing a great job)
The two main goals:
Motivate people to increase their donations (from 10% to 20% is probably much easier than from 0% to 10%)
Help people significantly increase their earnings through networking, coaching, financial advice, tax optimization, etc.
One of the most valuable things for the charity to do would be to help with networking
This could be a very small charity (1 or 2 people)
GWWC is looking into this a bit
Nice! Makes a lot of sense!
Personal anecdote:
I was donating 10% until I met a highly ambitious EA who made me realize I could be doing much more.
I’m looking for a job right now. I’m sure there are multiple software engineer EAs who would be happy to help me (eg. with interview advice), but there’s no easy way to connect.
I would like to help early-career SWEs, but only if they are ambitious about EA and aim to donate >10% of their income. There’s no easy way for me to find them.
Founding to Give is great but it’s only for (potential) entrepreneurs.
Anthropic has just launched “computer use”. “developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do”.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use
Ilya’s Safe Superintelligence Inc. has raised $1B.
Thanks for doing this, Ben!
Regarding the Founding to Give program:
Did you get many applicants?
What are their backgrounds?
What percentage of the selected candidates are technical?
What kind of profiles would you have liked to see more of?
This made my day 💛
Excited to see if it can match or even surpass the most successful EA podcast of all time.
By becoming a nonprofit entrepreneur you will build robust career capital and reach an impact equivalent to $338,000-414,000 donated* to the best charities in the world every year (e.g., GiveWell top charities)! If you do exceptionally well, we estimate that your impact can grow to $1M in annual counterfactual donations. This makes nonprofit entrepreneurship one of the most impactful jobs you could take!
*This calculation represents our most accurate estimate as of June 2023. It is based on assessing the average impact of charities we have launched and considers the counterfactual contributions of our co-founders—how much additional impact they have compared to what they would have achieved in another impactful role.Have you done this calculation for animal welfare founders?
John Schulman (OpenAI co-founder) has left OpenAI to work on AI alignment at Anthropic.
https://x.com/johnschulman2/status/1820610863499509855
Thanks for the post!
“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.”
1. Have you seen grants that you are confident are not a good use of EA’s money?
2. If so, do you think that if the grantmakers had asked for your input, you would have changed their minds about making the grant?
3. Do you think Open Philanthropy (and other grantmakers) should have external grant reviewers?
It seems like they haven’t accepted any non-profit since 2022, around the time Garry Tan became YC’s CEO. Garry has been very vocal against EA (specially AI Safety) on Twitter.