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).
Sorry about that! I've drafted like 3-4 different fundraising posts over the last few months, most of which were much longer and had more detail, but I also repeatedly ran into problems that when I showed them to people, they ended up misunderstanding how Lightcone relates to our future work and thinking about our efforts in a very narrow way by overfitting to all the details I put into the post, while missing something important about the way we expect to approach things over the coming years.
I ended up deciding to instead publish a short post, expecting that people will write a lot of questions in the comments, and then to engage straightforwardly and transparently there, which felt like a way that was more likely to end up with shared understanding. Not sure whether this was the right call, and definitely a good chunk of my decisions here are also driven by finding fundraising to be the single most stressful aspect of running Lightcone, and I just find navigating the stress of that easier if I respond to things in a more reactive way.
We are going to be wrapping up renovations and construction for the next month, and will then host a bunch of programs over the summer (like SERI MATS and a bunch of workshops and conferences). During that time I hope to reconnect a bit more with the surrounding AI-Alignment/X-Risk/Rationality/EA/Longtermist-adjacent diaspora, which I intentionally took a pretty big step away from after the collapse of FTX.
I will also be putting a bunch of efforts into Lightspeed Grants. We will see how much traction we get here, but I definitely think there is a chance that blows up into the primary project we'll be working on for a while, since I think there is a lot of value in diversifying and improving the funding ecosystem, which currently seems to drive a lot of crazy status-dynamics and crazy epistemics within people working on AI risk stuff.
After that, I expect to focus a lot more on online things. I probably want to do a major revamp of the AI Alignment Forum, as well as focus a lot of my attention more on LessWrong again. I am particularly excited about finally properly launching the dialogues feature and driving adoption of that, probably in parts by me and other Lightcone team members participating in a lot of dialogues while we also continue developing the technology on the backend.
I've been thinking a lot about this, and I don't yet have a clear answer. My tentative guess is something like "with a lot of the best people that I know going into AI policy stuff and the hype/excitement around that increasing, the comparative advantage of the Lightcone team is actually even more strongly pointing in the direction of focusing on research forums that ground the epistemic health of the people jumping headfirst into policy stuff". This means I currently expect to not get super deeply involved, but to interface a lot with people who are jumping into the policy fray, moving to DC, etc. and to figure out what infrastructure can allow those people to stay sane and grounded, since I do really expect that as we get more involved in advocacy, politics and policy-making that thinking clearly will become a lot harder.
But again, I don't know yet, and at the meta-level I might just organize a bunch of events to help people orient to the shifting policy landscape while I am orienting myself to it as well.
This sure seems hard to answer concisely. Hopefully you can figure out our vibe from my comments and posts. I still endorse a lot of the post you linked, though also changed my mind on a bunch of stuff. I might write more here later. I think this is a valid question, this comment is just already getting very long and I don't have an immediate good cached answer.
In my books I think by far the biggest win is that I think we relatively successfully handled a really major shift in relationship to the rest of our surrounding community, as an organization whose lifeblood is building infrastructure. My sense is that in all previous organization I've worked in, I would have rather left or shut the organization down when FTX collapsed, because I wouldn't have been able to think clearly and see things with fresh eyes, and orient with my organization to the changing landscape. I think Lightcone successfully handled reorienting together, and I think this is really hard (and probably the result of us staying consistently very small in our permanent staff headcount, which is currently just 8 people).
We also built an IMO really amazing campus that I expect to utilize and get a lot of value out of for the next few years. I also think I am proud of me writing a lot of things publicly on the EA Forum during the time of the FTX collapse and afterwards. I think it also helped the rest of the ecosystem orient better, and a lot of the things were things that nobody else was saying and seemed quite important.