For large grants, I do them. I would be very happy to have your analysis help me here.
If you have grants or projects you are very interested in, let me know, and I will take them into consideration, especially if you have lots of analysis for them.
Marcus Abramovitch šø
Karma: 4,280
Fast grants for AI x animals
If someone wants to do further research/āa shallow dive into vulture preservation, I would fund it. You can just DM me a 1 paragraph proposal. Open to college/āhigh school students doing this too.
Great find @MathiasKBšø
I think this is a great point. Thanks for raising it.
I have so much intended writing on my plate and, unfortunately, little time to do it.
In a nutshell, I think some employees are dedicated EAs who will give a lot of money to causes I deeply care about. Some of them have a binding agreement to donate a portion of their stock (and a match).
I donāt trust the founders. There is no legal mechanism I know of that binds them. The base rate of people effectively giving away large sums of wealth, even when they said they would, is shockingly low. They have said nothing EA-related in years apart from distancing themselves.
That said, I agree that Anthropic has a much more EA culture, for whatever that is worth. A lot of their employees are genuine EAs.
Being in San Francisco already warps your view of the world. Being inside Anthropicās doors must do more. I expect them to probably be above-average, typical billionaires, but to have their views on the world be changed by their experiences of the last few years and years to come.
@NickLaing I donāt need their money, Iāll say what I want. I think too highly of some of their employees to believe that my saying something bad about them that I thought was true would cause them to not listen to things I say or donate money differently than they thought optimal. If Iām wrong, I will happily eat my words.
Lorenzo, thanks for sharing that blog post. I didnāt know about that, though I know about many Anthropic foundersā previous affiliations with EA.
This is a slight update, but not enough to change my mind in the opposite direction. I already knew that Anthropic founders had a previous relationship to EA, and I donāt doubt that they have donated, maybe something on the order of 10% of their income to global health before Anthropic. I know Daniela is married to Holden. I know many Anthropic founders and staff are early signatories to the GWWC pledge. I know there was a group house, and I know that early on, Anthropic foundersā reasons for leaving OpenAI were around AI safety.
That said, my overall point still stands. They have greatly distanced themselves from EA and havenāt said anything public about it in years, apart from pretending they didnāt know what it was and other strange statements. Most of all, the base rate of sticking to a pledge like this is very low.
$1B is a very low number over 4-5 years, given their wealth and how much it could grow. Iād also be interested in any donations they have made privately in the last few years (remember, they still earn decent salaries and, above all, could liquidate some stock).
I would bet that Dario Amodei makes <$1B in donations before June 2027, self-reported (money has to move, not just say some shiboleth about donating the money in the future) at 50ā50 odds. Any 501(c)(3) would count.
Edit: Sorry, one more thing. I know many Anthropic employees and know about the donation match. I think many employees at Anthropic who intend to, and I believe will, donate significant amounts to charity over the next few years. Some have already started. I salute them, believe their intentions, and admire them. I merely think we have to go ābottom upā in counting these donations as opposed to ātop-down,ā where we assess a person and their intentions and what they will give to.
Can you stop with the LLM outputs?
To be clear, the average billionaire talks about the great things they will do with their money constantly. I put relatively low weight on this. I would love to see Anthropic founders do/āsay something like āeach of the 7 founders are selling a combined $1B of their stock and we are keeping none of it. It is all going to these organizations. AI is going to change the world rapidly and we expect a lot more money to flow to the philanthropic sector and we want to get this money out the door since they need time. It is a very small percentage of our stakes and our board has signed off.ā
I didnāt understand what this meant. Can you try to rephrase your point a bit simpler?
I disagree that it is full of this stuff. It does exist, though I donāt find the stuff to get surfaced much.
I still think this is weak. This is just typical PR. If they said āwe have already put our stock in a DAF. we are committed to getting this money to solve XYZ problemsā, I would still be skeptical. The base rate is just so low for giving away money and most billionaires actually do talk about their intentions with the money much more than these people. https://āāwww.wired.com/āāstory/āāanthropic-benevolent-artificial-intelligence/āā
Iāve written before that I am skeptical that the amount of funding being hypothesized is going to materialize in the quantities people seem to be suggesting/āspeculating. If I were to summarize that argument, Anthropic founders havenāt said a word about philanthropy in >3 years or something AFAIK, and yet we are just assuming they are going to donate 80% of their wealth. Furthermore, the base rates on people saying they are going to donate large sums and then following through is very low.
More importantly, though, it is just very hard to start an organization that can handle large amounts of money effectively until you have money to start with. How are you supposed to get to work until you have money to start with? I donāt think this is a chicken-and-egg problem so much as a more blanket āfirst the money is in the account, then you startā.
As an example, right now, there is an urgent need to get funds to stop the Save Our Bacon Act that could preempt any future farmed animal welfare legislation in the leader of the free world, the United States (as in, we cannot do any of our current best and most cost effective ideas if this passes) and we are struggling to get enough money (we are at $10M right now and we are being outspent).
I should note that a few months ago, I also massively front-loaded my donations such that I have very little in liquid assets. Though I have never met Jeff, him and his family have been an inspiration to me for many years.
Thanks Mal. Very informative
Iād be curious on any information with respect to the welfare of mosquitoes or other insects or other species that would be involved in this project.
I think thatās fair. I appreciate that you engage with this problem that I think most people ignore.
In these campaigns the meat producing companies could engage in similar advertising that would lead to a negative sum game.
I donāt think they could and I donāt think that is what is happening. I donāt think any meat producing companies couldā¦ engage in some kind of similar advertising.
Itās always possible to describe things in a very unflattering way, where you talk about some inputs as opposed to your goal or just describe it in a pessimistic light (eg, cheap/āstingy vs. frugal). The OP describes āprotests, or boycotts, or negotiationsā as not something he wants to fund, but I think if you talked about funding pyrethroid production, that would also not be something he wants to fund, though thatās another way of describing insecticide-treated bednets. You could also go even worse and talk about āmass genocide of insectsā or something.
To put it another way, I think global health people (who I have deep respect for) would be pretty upset and rightly call out someone writing a post where someone said they didnāt donate to global health charities since they donāt want to fund the chemical manufacturing industry, which is what we are actually purchasing.
But really, what we are funding is more protests, or boycotts, or negotiations with the companies or government agencies involved in factory farming.
Can you perhaps explain how this is different from say, AMF where what we are actually funding is pyrethroid production, manufacturing plants that create polyethylene nets people to hand out the nets?
Michael,
I donāt consider the Falcon Fundās grantmaking to be related to (classical) AI safety.
I think the work I do at Mechanize is very important for (classical) AI safety
I donāt think itās a good precedent to set to allow AI safety people to decide things for other cause areas. They have more than enough power in the movement as it is.
I canāt speak too much about my work at Mechanize, but I have very limited time outside of work these days, and I choose to spend a great deal of it on animal welfare issues.