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]
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 support person to the office team, and then later on dealing with closing it down and downsizing when the demand went away. I did all of that for free, and was not paid salary or anything by MATS, it was part of my Lightcone work, because we wanted to support mentorship happening in the AI alignment ecosystem. It's different this time around. They're paying us a substantial amount of money (well over $100k) for the use of 2.5 of our nicely furnished and designed buildings for 2 months, an amount that makes the trade pretty good for Lightcone (and I hope+expect to work hard and make it worthwhile for SERI MATS too!). The other workshops Habryka has mentioned elsethread will also mostly be paying trade partners (general pricing TBD as we get a better sense of the demand).
I bring this up because the extent to which funds for Lightcone are spent supporting SERI MATS in particular (and other teams/orgs/events) is (I suspect) much less than you are thinking.