Associate Program Officer on Coefficient Givingâs Short Timelines Special Projects team.
đ¸ GWWC Pledger
Michael Townsendđ¸
Karma: 2,627
I guess as you disclaimed might be the case up front, I donât think these are the strongest or most informed examples of EAs impact on AI safety.
In many of cases of such impact, one can quibble about many things:Whether that impact was clearly positive, or whether it had some kind of indirectly negative harmful effect, most commonly via speeding up AI development. See Paul Christianoâs reflections on the impact of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback as an example.
The counterfactuality and persistence of the impact â e.g., like you said for many of these, would this have happened (eventually) anyway?
How attributable that was to EA (and unfortunately in some cases, due to EA having a toxic brand in many places, itâs actually best if it is not that attributable to EA).
And last âDoes any of that matter? All of EAs impact â for better or worse â has been its influence on Anthropic.â
Yet, I think taken as a whole, I think EA has punched above its weight in many ways with respect to making AI go well. Itâs led to:
More and better staffed AI safety/âsecurity institutes
A richer non-profit ecosystem of safety research (like Truthful AI, FAR AI, Redwood Research, etc.)
More and better staffed third-party evaluations, auditing, and science (METR, AVERI)
Large amounts of field-building that encourages talented people to work on making AI go well (MATS, BlueDot, 80k)
A significant amount of policy advocacy and public communications about AI risk.
Probably other examples, too.
A lot of the effort to make this happened relied on EA motivated people willing to take lower paid or less glamorous jobs.[1] While some specific organizationsâ or research or policy wins or public communications would have happened otherwise, but some wouldnât, and even still, happening earlier is still better.
I started out in EA caring about global health, and my first EA job was as a Researcher at GWWC. Even after becoming pretty convinced by AI risk and longtermism, I was still fairly sympathetic to concerns like âAI Safety alienating peopleâ. For instance, I was pretty against 80,000 Hours becoming explicitly focused on longtermism, and also pretty skeptical /â worried about its pivot last year into leaning even more into AI. Now, looking at just how fast AI progress is developing, how much there is still be done to make it go well, and how valuable (I think) EA has been to date, I think I got a lot of that wrong.
- ^
And of course, in some cases, they happened to get pretty well-paid jobs that ended up being fairly glamorous (even if they werenât in the beginning). I donât think that undermines the impact much. I donât really begrudge the quant finance folks who give >50% of their income to charities, even if theyâre still pretty rich at the end of the day.
First, OpenAI may be successful in turning a large profit based on continued marginal improvements in AI systems, so that their company continues getting much more valuable, far faster than 5% annual growth, meaning that the endowment would grow in value, that is, on net accumulating rather than distributing wealth. In this case, OpenAIâs equity will appreciate greatly; it would be irresponsible for the nonprofit not to try to spend large parts of that increased value.
In this scenario, wouldnât it be much better if the non-profit didnât spend its money now? By holding onto the money now, itâd have much more to give later. Put another way: imagine if the grantees receiving the money were asked âwould you prefer $100 today or $10,000 in 6 years?â many would take the latter.
One frame that might make this argument more compelling is that if OAI ends up building AGI and ends up having astronomical value, then the foundation is sitting on humanityâs endowment. Spending it down now before itâs realized its value could be very costly.
Thanks for this post!
Curious what you think of the following objection: AI character work has to grapple with the question of whether we want AI systems to be âobedientâ or âethicalâ. Yet, it seems non-obvious which is better for the long-term future because training them to be ethical might make alignment risk worse, and training them to be obedient makes misuse and other risks worse. So if youâre uncertain about which is better â which I think you probably should be â then on expectation, the impact of affecting AI character is reduced proportional to how uncertain you are. I expect there are some ways you can affect AI character work that doesnât have this âobedience vs ethicalâ structure, but I also suspect that the argument made in this report about the importance of such work apply less to these interventions.
Hey Arepo!
Last I heard it was something like 10% of their GCR budget.
I donât think thatâs right â CG gave $400m to GHW in 2025, and to get a sense of what % that might be, Alexander Berger (CEO of CG) shared that overall âCoefficient Giving directed over $1 billion in 2025â in his recent letter.
CEA: now EA-adjacent!
It seems pretty hard to argue with the idea that:
Youâre more informed about what youâre giving up if you take the 10% Pledge after having worked for 1â5 years,
and itâs generally a good thing to be informed before you make life-long commitments!
But even still, I think being an undergrad at university is a pretty great time to take the 10% Pledge. Curious what you/âothers think of the arguments here.
One thought is: why should the default be to keep 100% of your income? The world seems on fire, money seems like it can do a lot of good, and the people weâre talking about pledging are likely pretty rich. I think in almost all cases, if youâre among the richest few percent of the world, itâs the right thing to do to give 10% (or more) of your income to effective charities. And I think that, even while youâre an undergrad, thereâs a good chance you can know with very high confidence youâre going to end up being among the richest few percent â assuming youâre not there already.
An analogy could be raising children as vegetarians/âvegans. I think this is a totally justified thing to do, and I personally wish I was raised vegetarian/âvegan, so that I never craved meat. Some think that itâs not fair to impose this dietary restriction on a child who canât make an informed choice, and itâd be better to only suggest they stop eating meat after they know what it tastes like. But given that eating meat is wrong (and itâs also an imposition on the child to make them eat meat before they know that it is wrong!) I donât think being an omnivore should be the default.
Thereâs admittedly an important disanalogy here: the parent isnât making a lifelong commitment on behalf of the child. But I think it still gets at something. At least in from my own experience, I feel like I benefited a lot from taking the 10% Pledge while at uni. If I hadnât, I think thereâs a good chance my commitment to my values could have drifted, and on top of that, every time I did give, itâd have felt like a big, voluntary/âoptional cost. Whereas now, it feels like a default, and I donât really know what itâs like to do things another way (something I value!).
That said, I think itâs pretty bad if anyone â but perhaps especially undergrads/âpeople who are less sure what theyâre signing up to â feels like they were pressured to make such a big commitment. And in general, itâs a rough situation if someone regrets it. But Iâve previously seen claims that undergrads pledging is bad, and should be discouraged, which seems like a step too far, and is more what I had in mind when I wrote this (sorry if thatâs not really making contact with your own views, Neel!).
Just speaking for myself, Iâd guess those would be the cruxes, though I donât personally see easy-fixes. I also worry that you could also err on being too cautious, by potential adding warning labels that give people an overly negative impression compared to the underlying reality. Iâm curious if there are examples where you think GWWC could strike a better balance.
I think this might be symptomatic of a broader challenge for effective giving for GCR, which is that most of the canonical arguments for focusing on cost-effectiveness involve GHW-specific examples, that donât clearly generalize to the GCR space. But I donât think that indicates you shouldnât give to GCR, or care about cost-effectiveness in the GCR space â from a very plausible worldview (or at least, the worldview I have!) the GCR-focused funding opportunities are the most impactful funding opportunities available. Itâs just that the kind of reasoning underlying those recommendations/âevaluations are quite different.
(I no longer work at GWWC, but wrote the reports on the LTFF/âECF, and was involved in the first round of evaluations more generally.)
In general, I think GWWCâs goal here is to âto support donors in having the highest expected impact given their worldviewâ which can come apart from supporting donors to give to the most well-researched/âvetted funding opportunities. For instance, if you have a longtermist worldview, or perhaps take AI x-risk very seriously, then Iâd guess youâd still want to give to the LTFF/âECF even if you thought the quality of their evaluations was lower than GiveWellâs.
Some of this is discussed in âWhy and how GWWC evaluates evaluatorsâ in the limitations section:
Finally, the quality of our recommendations is highly dependent on the quality of the charity evaluation field in a cause area, and hence inconsistent across cause areas. For example, the state of charity evaluation in animal welfare is less advanced than that in global health and wellbeing, so our evaluations and the resulting recommendations in animal welfare are necessarily lower-confidence than those in global health and wellbeing.
And also in each of the individual reports, e.g. from the ACE MG report:
As such, our bar for relying on an evaluator depends on the existence and quality of other donation options we have evaluated in the same cause area.
In cause areas where we currently rely on one or more evaluators that have passed our bar in a previous evaluation, any new evaluations we do will attempt to compare the quality of the evaluatorâs marginal grantmaking and/âor charity recommendations to those of the evaluator(s) we already rely on in that cause area.
For worldviews and associated cause areas where we donât have existing evaluators we rely on, we expect evaluators to meet the bar of plausibly recommending giving opportunities that are among the best options for their stated worldview, compared to any other opportunity easily accessible to donors.
First just wanted to say that this:
In my first year after taking the pledge, I gave away 20% of my income. However I had been able to save and invest much of my disposable income from my relatively well paid career before taking the pledge and so had built up strong financial security for myself and my family. As a result, I increased my donations over time and since 2019, have given away 75% of my income.
...is really inspiring :).
Iâm interested in knowing more about how Allan decides where to donate. For example:I currently split my donations between the Longview Philanthropy Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long Term Future Fund- I believe in giving to funds and letting experts with much more knowledge than me identify the best donation opportunities.
How did Allan arrive at this decision, and how confident does he feel in it? Also, how connected does Allan feel with other EtGâers who are giving a similar amounts based on a similar worldview?
Just on this point:
Relatedly, it feels like this is not what the username field is for. If Iâm interacting with someone on some topic unrelated to my advocacy it feels intrusive and uncooperative to be bringing it into the conversation
I think this argument might have a lot of power among folks who tend to think of social norms in quite explicit/âanalytical terms, and who put a lot of emphasis on being cooperative. But I suspect relatively few people will see this as uncooperative/âintrusive, because the pin and the idea itâs advocating are pretty non-offensive.
Luke, thank you for everything youâve done for GWWC and the world.
I donât think many people get to meet someone with such extraordinary levels of care, both for those far away in space/âtime, and loved ones nearby. While I was working at GWWC, Lukeâs most common reason to take a day off was to help someone move house. Luke, your kindness, integrity and commitment are contagious â even with you no longer at the organization, those virtues will stay with GWWC in large part because of how you demonstrated them.
Hereâs a graph of new 10% Pledgers since Luke joined GWWC.[1]
- ^
Courtesy of Claude⌠though my critical feedback for it is that it makes it look like 2024 hasnât happened yet, and that Luke joined in 2019. Both false!
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Unfortunately, I canât see that option â it just displays my email.
Thanks for sharing this, and more importantly, for writing it. From my perspective, this is the best reporting on AI that Iâve seen. Iâve shared it with previously ultra-sceptical friends, and had an uncharacteristically positive response.
Hi Vasco â not all organisations shared permission to have their name shared, but it includes many of the fundraising organisations on this list.
Giving What We Can is looking for a Researcher to help us identify the most effective donation opportunities for a variety of worldviews, and recommend these to our donors.
Salary and benefits: Salary for candidates is based on this calculator (which is explained in more depth here). Benefits and policies depend on location, but we aim to provide benefits equally wherever we can. See here for an example of an offer to a US candidate â we have similar benefits in other locations.
Location: Remote.
Apply here by
February 18thMarch 2ndEssential skills, traits and experience
A passion for making the world a better place
Strong grasp of key research concepts in effective giving and effective altruism
A scout mindset and a strong commitment to communicating accurately and truthfully
Excellent analytical skills; comfort working with quantitative and qualitative frameworks
Probabilistic reasoning and calibration; the ability to think in a Bayesian way
Prioritisation and judgement; the ability to (re-)focus your time on whatâs most important and relevant
Ability to work both autonomously and in a team; comfort with working remotely
Desirable skills, traits and experience
Experience in impact-focused charity evaluation and/âor grantmaking
Great written communication skills, especially in translating technical information to be understandable and compelling to the public
Generalist skills and flexibility and adaptability to other types of valuable work needed at various times, in addition to the responsibilities mentioned above
About GWWC: GWWC is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. The GWWC team is hard-working and mission-focused, with a culture of open and honest feedback. We also like to think of ourselves as a particularly friendly and optimistic bunch.
In all our work, we strive to take a positive and collaborative attitude, be transparent in our communication and decision-making, and adopt a scout mindset to guide us towards doing the most good we can do, including by evaluating our own impact and learning from the results. To learn more, check out our current strategy.
The process
Our hiring process involves four stages (applicants will be compensated for their time spent on stages 2-3):
Application form (~2 hours)
Written work test (~2 hours)
Work trial (~10 hours)
Interview, online over Zoom (~1 hour) and reference checks.
We will close applications on the 2nd of March and aim to make an offer (provided we find a suitable candidate) by the end of April, with the successful candidate starting as soon as possible thereafter.
See also here to get a sense of our approach from a hiring round we did in early 2022.
Thanks Vasco, this is good feedback.
To better reflect how your different recommendations are linked to particular worldviews, I think it would be good to change the name of your area/âfund âglobal health and wellbeingâ to âglobal human health and wellbeingâ
We considered a wide variety of names, and after some deliberation (and a survey or two), we landed on âglobal health and wellbeingâ because we think it is a good balance of accurate and compelling. I agree with some the limitations you outlined, and like your alternative suggestion, especially from a âResearcherâsâ point of view where Iâm very focused on. Iâll share this with the team, but I expect that there would be too much cost switch at this point.
However, I wonder how much of your and Sjirâs views are being driven by path dependence. [...] Given this, I worry you may hesitate to recommend interventions in animal welfare over human welfare even if you found it much more plausible that both areas should be assessed under the same (impartial welfarist) worldview.
Itâs a bit tricky to respond to this having not (at least yet) done an analysis comparing animal versus human interventions. But for if/âwhen we do, I agree it would be important to be aware of the incentives you mentioned, and to avoid making decisions based on path dependencies rather than high quality research. More generally, a good part of our motivation for this project was to help create better incentives for the effective giving ecosystem. So weâd see coming to difficult decisions on cause-prioritisation, if we thought they were justified, as very much within the scope of our work and a way it could add value.
Hi Rebecca â we did not look into The Life You Can Save for this round. As shared here we only looked into the six evaluators/âfunds listed in this post, and in our âWhy and how GWWC evaluates evaluatorsâ we shared how we decided which evaluators to prioritise. Itâs too soon to say which evaluators weâll look into next, though we can share that our current inclination is that looking into Founders Pledgeâs research, and expanding the cause areas we include (like climate change, or âmetaâ work) is a particularly high priority.
Thanks Nick! It was really illuminating for me personally to look under the hood of GW, and Iâm glad you appreciated our summary of the work.
In this round of evaluations, we only looked into Animal Charity Evaluators, GiveWell, Happier Lives Institute, EA Fundsâ Animal Welfare Fund and Long-Term Future Fund, and Longviewâs Emerging Challenges Fund. In future evaluations, we would like to look into Founders Pledgeâs work, climate change more generally, and other evaluators. Itâs too soon to commit to which, and in which order, just yet.
Also, did you evaluate GWâs Top Charity Fund of All Grants Fund?
Jonasâ reply is spot on here â we essentially looked into both and to GW more generally.
Fair enough â I think I was trying to say something along the lines of âgoing through any specific example invites a lot of genuinely thorny and difficult questions about counterfactuality/âsign of impact/âattribution to EAâ (and again many of these are hard to discuss on a public forum) but I think zooming out, you can see EAs fingerprints in various important places. I think this leads to an overall common-sense perspective that EA has helped improve the situation.
Also, I agree I pointed to work in the middle of the ToC chain, but that seems kind of reasonable to me given that AI is currently not that powerful and not really that scary. AI hasnât yet been capable of causing a disaster, so itâs not really possible to have prevented one (yet).
On the specific example of Redwood Research is doing a lot of really valuable safety work. I think pioneering Control has been a fairly useful accomplishment, and I suspect if someone wanted to dig into the details, theyâd find that it was fairly counterfactual.