To play devil’s advocate (these don’t actually represent my beliefs):
I can’t remember any EA orgs failing to reach a fundraising target.
This doesn’t necessarily mean much, because fundraising targets have a lot to do with how much money EA orgs believe they can raise.
Open Phil has recently posted about an org they wish existed but doesn’t and funder-initiated startups.
It’s pretty hard to get funding for a new organization, e.g. Spencer and I put a lot of effort into it without much success. The general problem I see is a lack of “angel investing” or its equivalent–the idea of putting money into small, experimental organizations and funding them further as they grow. (As a counter-counterpoint, EA Ventures seems well poised to function as an angel investor in the nonprofit world.)
Also, to address the general point that EA is talent-constrained, the problem might be that there are very few people with the skills needed, and more funding can be used to train people, like MIRI is doing with the summer fellows program. In that case earning to give is still a good solution to the talent constraint.
These are both good points worth addressing! My understanding on (2) is that any proposed method of slowing down AGI research would likely antagonize the majority of AI researchers with relatively little actual slowdown. It seems more valuable to build alliances with current AI researchers, and get them to care about safety, in order to increase the amount of safety-concerned research done vs. safety-agnostic research.