A_donor

I am an earlyish crypto investor who has accumulated enough to be a mid-sized grantmaker, and I intend to donate most of my money over the next 5-10 years to try and increase the chances that humanity has a wonderful future. My best guess is that this is mostly decided by whether we pass the test of AI alignment, so that’s my primary focus. AI alignment has lots of money flowing into it, with some major organizations not running fundraisers, Zvi characterizing SFF as having “too much money”, OpenPhil expanding its grantmaking for the cause, FTX setting themselves up as another major grantmaker, and ACX reporting the LTFF’s position as: > what actually happened was that the Long Term Future Fund approached me and said “we will fund every single good AI-related proposal you get, just hand them to us, you don’t have to worry about it” So the challenge is to find high-value funding opportunities in a crowded space. One option would be to trust that the LTFF or whichever organization I pick will do something useful with the money, and I think this is a perfectly valid default choice. However, I suspect that as the major grantmakers are well-funded, I have a specific comparative advantage over them in allocating my funds: I have much more time per unit money to assess, advise, and mentor my grantees. It helps that I have enough of an inside view of what kinds of things might be valuable that I have some hope of noticing gold when I strike it. Additionally, I can approach people who would not normally apply to a fund. What is my grantmaking strategy? First, I decided what parts of the cause to focus on. I’m most interested in supporting alignment infrastructure, because I feel relatively more qualified to judge the effectiveness of interventions to improve the funnel which takes in people who don’t know about alignment in one end, takes them through increasing levels of involvement, and (when successful) ends with people who make notable contributions. I’m also excit