I know you must have been told this repeatedly, but in case no-one's said it lately: you're both saints. Thank you.
Aww, thanks!
(I think of the "saint" framing as primarily being about sacrifice, but that's not what we're going for and someone looking over the material conditions of our life would probably conclude that we're doing pretty well. Being able to give as described in the post is downstream from earning a lot of money as a software engineer in big tech and buying a house before the prices went up even more.)
I appreciate your generosity! Given your beliefs, this strategy makes sense to me. I did want to point out some nuance with the Metaculus market market you linked here.
But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly
In this market, about 20% of probability mass is in the past, and additional 20% of the probability mass is on dates 10 years or more in the future. I recognize that stating "transformative AI is coming very quickly" doesn't necessarily imply that the linked market shares your level of confidence, but I think it's worth pointing out what Metaculus' distribution currently looks like nonetheless.
(Copying my comments over from Facebook:)
Thanks for all your donations and direct work and transparency about these things!
From my perspective it's unclear whether or not you're leaving a lot of potential impact on the table, due to a few considerations:
(1) Are your retirement savings invested optimally? The difference between e.g. a 25% annual return and a 50% annual return on your ~$1.5M in retirement savings is $375,000 in the next year. I haven't had a 401(k) in years, but my understanding is that 401(k)s limit how you're able to invest the money, so if your retirement savings are in a 401(k) this could be very suboptimal assuming AI stocks are going to keep growing much faster than the rest of the economy, as I expect they probably will for the next couple of years at least. (VanEck Semiconductor ETF is up 135% in the last 12 months.)
(2) What do you think is the difference in cost-effectiveness between the most cost-effective donation opportunities you can find and your current work? SecureBio sounds like valuable altruistic work, but even if it's a 99th percentile donation opportunity, you may be able to identify a ~99.9th percentile donation opportunity that is 10x as cost-effective, in which case your salary-sacrifice direct work strategy may be suboptimal. Or perhaps there is a different direct work job you could do that would be much higher impact than your work at SecureBio.
It sounds like you put a much higher probability on AI-caused catastrophe in the next two years than I do, though maybe your 10% forecast below just wasn't made carefully and your true credence is actually lower:
Let's try and make some similar predictions for 2028:
My odds that the world has changed substantially are up significantly, maybe 55%, primarily due to AI. I'd put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where I'm not here to write a followup and you're not here to read one.
10% that you'll be unable to write a blog post by 2028 (even end of 2028) due to being dead from a global catastrophe seems *way* too high to me. I'd put that at less than 1% by mid-2028. Also, if there really is a 10% chance that you'll be dead two years from now due to an AI-caused catastrophe, it's worth flagging that this means that AI represents about 95% of your mortality risk in the next two years (!!!). (99.3% of American men who turn 40 make it two more years to their 42nd birthday according to https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html).
I wonder if your forecast is 10% because you're much more pessimistic than I am about AI risk in general or because you have more aggressive AI timelines (or both)?
To answer this, what are your forecasts that you'll be dead as a result of a global catastrophe by mid-2028/2030/2032/2035/2040? Well actually, I'm not sure whether a good forecast for this for 2040 is 10% or 70%, but if the right forecast for the risk of you dying due to an AI-caused catastrophe by mid-2040 is X%, then what's your forecast for this by mid-2028/2030/2032/2035? My forecasts would be roughly 0.01X/0.05X/0.2X/0.6X, so my number by mid-2028 is ~0.1%-0.7%, i.e. much lower than your 10%.
Also, in those 10% of scenarios where you're imagining where we're dead in two years due to an AI-caused catastrophe, what kind of AI-caused catastrophe are you imagining? Is the bulk of the (you and I aren't here in two years) risk AI takeover risk or engineered pandemic risk or something else in your mind?
(1) Are your retirement savings invested optimally?
It's mostly a Vanguard 401k, and I do have a lot of choice of funds. But I have it in total-market index funds for a combination of:
I'm skeptical of my ability to price stocks better than the market. Everyone can see the same returns that are pushing you towards investing in AI stocks.
Much of the benefit of the retirement savings is in worlds where AI slows down massively, in which case moving it all into AI stocks would have been quite a bad choice.
I wonder if your forecast is 10% because you're much more pessimistic than I am about AI risk in general or because you have more aggressive AI timelines (or both)?
Both, I think, though looking at your numbers below I think it's mostly timelines.
I think change might come very quickly, in a wide variety of ways.
if there really is a 10% chance that you'll be dead two years from now due to an AI-caused catastrophe, it's worth flagging that this means that AI represents about 95% of your mortality risk in the next two years
Yup. Worth taking seriously! I think it's somewhat more than 95% of my risk, since I'm not likely to die of a drug overdose (no drugs at all) and don't drive very much.
To answer this, what are your forecasts that you'll be dead as a result of a global catastrophe by mid-2028/2030/2032/2035/2040? ... 0.01X/0.05X/0.2X/0.6X
This is very off the cuff, but maybe 0.4X/0.8X/0.9X/0.95X? So 10%, 20%, 22%, 24% (and then 25%). Much more front-loaded than yours. My thinking is that AI is moving very quickly, and a large proportion of the risk is in worlds where we don't have time to build defenses and general societal resilience.
in those 10% of scenarios where you're imagining where we're dead in two years due to an AI-caused catastrophe, what kind of AI-caused catastrophe are you imagining?
I think biorisk is a large proportion of the early risks, but accelerating things that don't spread infectiously (drones, toxins) or massive societal collapse (no food) is also significant.
massive societal collapse (no food)
What do you think the AI would do that would cause the societal collapse?
(2) What do you think is the difference in cost-effectiveness between the most cost-effective donation opportunities you can find and your current work?
Until recently I thought that SecureBio was close enough to my best donation option that, after taking into account the efficiencies of salary sacrifice, I should not take my full salary. I recently changed this after (a) SB started doing a lot better with fundraising and (b) with SB being a 501(c)(3) there's a lot of money that can fund it which can't fund other opportunities.
Or perhaps there is a different direct work job you could do that would be much higher impact than your work at SecureBio.
I think this is pretty unlikely, but feel free to try and make the case ;)
Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can.
Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:
table...
On savings, there are two things going on. We're drawing down our regular post-tax savings to donate more (-$72k) but we're still putting money into retirement accounts (+$51k). It nets to -$20k, though mixing pre- and post-tax numbers into one sum isn't really correct.
We've been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it feels very different now because of the AI boom. Some of this is that people who've made money in the boom will likely be giving more soon, and so money spent now can help set up organizations to spend future money more effectively. But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly, for better or worse. We want to push hard for "better".
If you compare to previous years (2024, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), we're donating a lot less than we used to in absolute terms:
table...
Adjusted for inflation:Until mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, optimizing to maximize donations, and now I'm at a non-profit. This means we're giving a larger fraction, but of a smaller amount:
I feel good about this change. I'm now building an early warning system for engineered pandemics, which is urgent and important as AI increasingly substitutes for advice from expert virologists. It does mean donating much less than I would have if I'd continued in big tech, but I think this was well worth it. While money can enable important work, I see a lot of projects that primarily need dedicated people to bring them into existence, and I'd be excited for others to switch to direct work.
Even though we're drawing down our savings to donate, our net worth rose 18% over the last year (adjusted for inflation). This was driven by stock returns on our retirement savings:
Now, retirement savings growing via stock returns is how it's "supposed" to work: if we give away all the gains then we'll have much less at retirement. But I see ~three futures as AI becomes rapidly more capable:
Things go very poorly, long-term savings are mostly useless, and we really wish we'd done more.
Things go very well, the world is very wealthy, we don't need the additional money.
Somehow, AI ends up being not that big a deal, and the world is still pretty normal financially.
It's really only in that last world where our savings translate into us having a better life, and as AI continues not hitting a wall I see the chances of ending up in a basically normal world getting pretty small. While we shouldn't donate to where we'd be destitute if we're wrong, we're not in danger of that. [1] So I think we should continue to draw down our non-retirement savings to donate more during this critical period.
Writing this post also got me thinking about our retirement contributions. We're both contriubuting the maximum, which I think often makes sense even if you don't expect a normal retirement, from a perspective of protecting savings. Since we're in a good enough position financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we should stop contributing to have more to donate going forward.
Evaluating Predictions
Back in 2024 I made a list of what I expected to write in 2026. How did reality differ from expectations?I did this for a little while. I started at a 10% reduction, and then when Julia's work decided to no longer support voluntary salary reductions I went to 75%. Then a few months ago I decided to stop since I wanted more flexibility in targeting donations.
Yup, still doing a nanny share with our former housemate. While there was a bit where our nanny left and it took us a few tries to find someone who worked out, this is now going well again. We haven't decided what we'll do for afterschool when our youngest starts school in the Fall.
My prediction that I would be lazy was correct. This post represents zero accounting improvements, only more data due to the passage of time.
The world is appreciably different from two years ago, but not in ways that strongly impacted our spending.
Making New Predictions
Let's try and make some similar predictions for 2028:My odds that the world has changed substantially are up significantly, maybe 55%, primarily due to AI. I'd put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where I'm not here to write a followup and you're not here to read one. Then maybe 10% on really good futures where there's no need for me to work on biosecurity and I can do music, dance, and blogging full time. And 35% on weird futures where we're not dead but it's not clearly good either. Don't put a lot of weight on these numbers!
Childcare costs will be down a lot, because all three kids will be in school. But we'll still need to pay for afterschool, holidays, and vacations. Our oldest will be in 8th grade, so no college costs yet. Back in 2018 I was thinking that sometime around 2028 I might be moving from earning to give to direct work (due to the effective 100% marginal tax rate), but I ended up doing this earlier and for non-college reasons.
We won't be pulling from savings to fund donations because we'll have finished giving away our remaining non-retirement savings. But with so much lower childcare costs we'll probably still be able to give over 50%.
We don't have any expensive house projects. With how much the world could change soon I want to keep options open, and not lock up money in the house.
We're still living in the same house, and our housing costs will have gone down slightly because rents will have gone up a little (in a combination of real and nominal terms) but our mortgage is fixed-rate.
Our shared car is a 2013 Honda Fit, and while these are great cars there's a decent chance it won't last much longer. Might need to make a substantial payment here.
Details
I've used the same approach as last year, which was unchanged from 2022 and very similar before then. Numbers below are monthly, based on 2025 spending.[1] Our house is 2/3 paid off, if we used savings to finish it off that would leave ~$1M saved. At a 4% safe withdrawal income this would be $3.3k/month. We also rent out several parts of our house, totalling $4.8k/month, which brings us to ~$100k/y of raw income. This would need to cover taxes, health insurance, utilities, house maintenance, food, etc, but almost everyone lives on far less. I think the largest risk is that we get a non-extinction future that's still quite bad, but I have trouble seeing moderately higher savings making a large difference there.
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