Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding and are working on the following projects:
- We run LessWrong, the AI Alignment Forum, and have written a lot of the code behind the Effective Altruism Forum.
- During 2022 and early 2023 we ran the Lightcone Offices, and are now building out a campus at the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, where we've been doing repairs and renovations for the past few months.
- We've also been substantially involved in the Survival and Flourishing Fund's S-Process (having written the app that runs the process) and are now running Lightspeed Grants.
- We also pursue a wide range of other smaller projects in the space of "community infrastructure" and "community crisis management". This includes running events, investigating harm caused by community institutions and actors, supporting programs like SERI MATS, and maintaining various small pieces of software infrastructure.
If you are interested in funding us, please shoot me an email at habryka@lesswrong.com (or if you want to give smaller amounts, you can donate directly via PayPal here).
Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX, and I do think we work on projects that have a decent chance of reducing existential risk and generally making humanity's future go a lot better, though this kind of stuff sure is hard to tell. We are looking to raise around $3M to $6M for our operations in the next 12 months.[1]
Also feel free to ask any questions in the comments.
- ^
Two draft readers of this post expressed confusion that Lightcone needs money, given that we just announced a funding process that is promising to give away $5M in the next two months. The answer to that is that we do not own the money moved via Lightspeed Grants and are only providing grant recommendations to Jaan Tallinn and other funders.
We do separately apply for funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, through which Jaan has been our second biggest funder. We also continue to actively fundraise from both SFF and Open Philanthropy (our largest funder).
Thinking about the exact financing of the Inn is a bit messy, especially if we compare it to doing something like running the Lightcone Offices, because of stuff like property appreciation, rental income from people hosting events here, and the hard-to-quantify costs of tying up capital in real estate as opposed to more liquid assets like stocks.
If you assume something like 5% property appreciation per year going forward, and you amortize the part of our construction costs that didn't increase the property value over the next 7 years (which seems like a reasonable estimate for how long the venue is going to get used), I get an annual cost of running the Rose Garden of about $1.15M (property value of ~$19MM, ~$3.5M in uncapitalized construction costs amortized over 7 years, plus $700k in annual upkeep and maintenance costs).
This is pretty cost-effective compared to other options of even just providing office space, and I think is my preferred way of thinking about the cost of doing this construction project (most of which came from a loan that we took out specifically to finance the purchase and renovation of the place, which is insured against the Rose Garden property itself, so it didn't straightforwardly funge against our other funding).
To compare this to other costs, renting two floors of the WeWork, which we did for most of the summer last year, cost around $1.2M/yr for 14,000 sq. ft. of office space. The Rose Garden has 20,000 sq. ft. of floor space and 20,000 additional sq. ft. of usable outdoor space for less implied annual cost than that.
In order to fund this initial capital investment, we did definitely cut into the funding we received in 2022, and we would have a bunch of money in our bank accounts right now if we didn't do this construction project. On the other hand, our spending over the next few years would also be a bunch larger, since we would have to pay more in rent if we wanted to do anything in-person community shaped, for both events and office space, than we will have to pay in interest and upkeep minus appreciation for the Rose Garden Inn.
This doesn't take into account the cost of having Jaan Tallinn's capital tied up in real estate with 5% annual interest from us. In one sense it seems good for Jaan to diversify his funds away from crypto. On the other hand he has probably been making closer to 10%-20% annual returns over the last 10-15 years with his investments. My current guess is the diversification benefits here outweigh the higher potential returns (because man, x-risk efforts sure still are quite tech-stock and crypto loaded and I am very glad about more diversification), but I am really not confident, and this could easily dominate the relevant cost-calculations.
It's also a bit unclear how to think about rental income from people working on existential risk stuff that we wouldn't otherwise support, which I expect to also make us back some of these funds.
I could write more about how to think about financing the Rose Garden, but I'll leave it at this. I think it it mostly makes sense for people to think that roughly $1.5M of our annual budget going forward will be used for our Rose Garden Inn, with ~$350k of that going into very illiquid long-term savings for the organization.
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By far the biggest source of uncertainty about our budget comes from the potential for FTX clawbacks, which explains most of the wide range of our budget. I currently think we owe back about $1.5M to FTX creditors, though the exact game theory here is a bit messy (and they might request up to $4M back from us). We don't know if and when they will ask for that money.
The purchase of the Rose Garden Inn and really setting the whole renovation project in-motion was made before November last year, and as such before the collapse of FTX, and as is probably apparent from my comments and posts over the last few months (as well as our reasoning for closing down the Lightcone Offices), a lot of our strategy and perspective has shifted since then.
That said, I am actually still quite excited about our plans with the Rose Garden, but I do think it's an important disclaimer to add that yeah, a lot of our plans for the Rose Garden were substantially changed when FTX collapsed, and our plans for it have become a bunch less straightforward (the original reasoning for it was something much closer to "this makes sense from a finance perspective even if we just compare it to renting office space at our current location").
That said I am still quite excited about our plans. Some concrete things that continue to drive my excitement for our Rose Garden Inn investment: