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 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]
Edit (June 23): I've now given a lot more details on how we operate and what we work on in the comments. I would recommend checking them out if you want to more context on our work.
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).
For the record, our relationship to supporting events for this ecosystem is changing from something like "all of our resources are the same, here have my venue for free if you need it" to "markets and pricing are a great way for large masses of people to coordinate on the value of a good or service, let's coordinate substantially via trade".
For instance, during a previous cohort of SERI MATS scholars at the Lightcone Offices, I spent a couple of weeks of work adding a second floor and getting it furnished and doing interior design, hiring another sup... (read more)
At least for the coming year, our expenses are pretty entangled between all the different projects in a way that makes differentially funding things hard. I do take preferences of our donors on how to focus our efforts into account, so donating and just telling us that you would prefer us to work more on one kind of thing vs. another will have some effect.
My guess is you will mostly just have to average our impact across different areas and decide whether the whole portfolio is above your bar.
Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding and are working on the following projects:
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]
Edit (June 23): I've now given a lot more details on how we operate and what we work on in the comments. I would recommend checking them out if you want to more context on our work.
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).