The Long-Term Future Fund is pleased to invite applications to our Q1 2025 funding round. We are seeking to support individuals and organizations working to help humanity navigate existential risks or working on projects improving humanity’s long-term flourishing.

Deadline for applying is February 15th. We will respond to applications submitted before then by March 31st, and should have most funding disbursed by April 30th.

Why Grant Rounds?
After a period of accepting applications on a rolling basis, we're trialling returning to focused grant rounds. I am hoping this will:

Allow us to recalibrate our funding thresholds given a rapidly changing giving environment
Provide donors with clearer feedback on the impact of their contributions
Offer

... (read 482 more words →)

Replying toWhat is MIRI currently doing?

calebp991y

What is MIRI currently doing?

You can find the team on the team page. https://techgov.intelligence.org/team

Replying toShould there be just one western AGI project?

calebp991y

Should there be just one western AGI project?

I liked various parts of this post and agree that this is an under-discussed but important topic. I found it a little tricky to understand the information security section. Here are a few disagreements (or possibly just confusions).

A single project might motivate more serious attacks, which are harder to defend against.

It might also motivate earlier attacks, such that the single project would have less total time to get security measures into place.\

In general, I think it's more natural to think about how expensive an attack will be and how harmful that attack would be if it were successful, rather than reasoning about when an attack will happen.

Here I am imagining that you think... (read 385 more words →)

Replying toVote on Interesting Disagreements

calebp992y

Vote on Interesting Disagreements

Most LWers should rely less on norms of their own (or the LW community's) design, and instead defer to regular societal norms more.

•••

Replying toThoughts on open source AI

calebp992y

Thoughts on open source AI

@peterbarnett and I quickly looked at summaries for ~20 papers citing Llama 2, and we thought ~8 were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged for capabilities over safety, ~7 were better for safety than capabilities, and ~5 were better for capabilities than safety. For me, this was a small update towards the effects of Llama 2 so far, having been positive.

•••

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair

Linch

Linch, calebp99, abergal

EDIT 2023/11/21

We have finished evaluating the first batch of our applications.

As we have not yet finished the hiring process, people are still welcome to apply to us. We are still very likely to skim future applications, however we have no firm commitments to do so.

Candidates are welcome to message me either here or in other channels to flag their late applications with us.

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair. You can apply here.

Summary

The Long-Term Future Fund is seeking a new full-time fund chair to lead strategy, fundraising, management, and grant evaluation.
The chair will articulate a vision for the fund, coordinate stakeholders, improve processes, represent the fund, and make final

... (read 2033 more words →)

Replying toLTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

calebp992y

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

Thank you, that would be great!

Long-Term Future Fund Ask Us Anything (September 2023)

Linch

Linch, calebp99, abergal, habryka, Thomas Larsen, LawrenceC, Lauro Langosco

The Long-Term Future Fund has an AMA up on the Effective Altruism Forum.

There’s no real deadline for questions, but let’s say we have a soft commitment to focus on questions asked on or before September 8th.

I'd prefer centralizing the questions to one place. If you don't want to post of the forum, for whatever reason (ideological opposition to EA, got banned before, lost your password and don't want to make a new comment), I'm happy to for you to comment here and for me to repost them on the Forum.

Our donation link is here.

Replying toLTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

calebp992y

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

That's helpful feedback; if others would find donating through every.org helpful (which they can signal by agree-voting with the parent comment), I'd be happy to look into this.

I think we can be very flexible for donations over $30k, so if you're interested in making a donation of that size feel free to dm me and I am sure we can figure something out.

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

Linch

Linch, calebp99

UPDATE 2023/09/13:

Including only money that has already landed in our bank account and extremely credible donor promises of funding, LTFF has raised ~1.1M and EAIF has raised ~500K. After Open Phil matching, this means LTFF now has ~3.3M additional funding and EAIF has ~1.5m in additional funding.

From my (Linch)'s perspective, this means both LTFF nor EAIF are no longer very funding constrained for the time period we wanted to raise money for (the next ~6 months), however both funds are still funding constrained and can productively make good grants with additional funding.

See this comment for more details.

Summary

EA Funds aims to empower thoughtful individuals and small groups to carry out altruistically impactful projects... (read 4366 more words →)

Replying toSummary of and Thoughts on the Hotz/Yudkowsky Debate

calebp992y

Summary of and Thoughts on the Hotz/Yudkowsky Debate

On my computer, Ctrl-f finds ~10 cases of Holtz appearing in the main text, e.g. point 4 of the introduction.

> ... This included a few times when Yudkowsky’s response was not fully convincing and there was room for Holtz to go deeper, and I wish he would have in those cases. ...

What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund

Linch

Linch, calebp99, Daniel_Eth

The Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) makes small, targeted grants with the aim of improving the long-term trajectory of humanity. We are currently fundraising to cover our grantmaking budget for the next 6 months. We would like to give donors more insight into how we prioritize different projects, so they have a better sense of how we plan to spend their marginal dollar. Below, we’ve compiled fictional but representative grants to illustrate what sort of projects we might fund depending on how much we raise for the next 6 months, assuming we receive grant applications at a similar rate and quality to the recent past.

Our motivations for presenting this information are a) to provide transparency about... (read more)

Long-Term Future Fund: April 2023 grant recommendations

abergal

abergal, calebp99, Linch, habryka, Thomas Larsen, Vaniver

(Cross-posted from the EA Forum.)

Introduction

This payout report is meant to cover the Long-Term Future Fund's grantmaking starting January 2022 (after our December 2021 payout report), going through April 2023 (1 January 2022 - 30 April 2023).

Total funding recommended: $13.0M
Total funding paid out: $12.16M
Number of grants paid out: 327
Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 50.0%
Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 37.4%
Report authors: Asya Bergal (chair), Linchuan Zhang, Oliver Habryka, Caleb Parikh, Thomas Larsen, Matthew Graves

52 of our grantees, worth $1.41M, requested that we not include public reports for their grants. (You can read our policy on public reporting here.) We referred 2 grants to other funders for evaluation ($0.501M). Our median response time over this period was 29... (read 14979 more words →)

Replying toAlignment Grantmaking is Funding-Limited Right Now

calebp993y

Alignment Grantmaking is Funding-Limited Right Now

We are hoping to release a report in the next few weeks giving a run down on our grantmaking over the last year, with some explanations for why we made the grants and some high level reflections on the fund.

Some things that might be useful:
* Fund page where we give more context on the goals of the fund: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future
* Our old payout reports: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future#payout-reports
* Our public grants database: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants?fund=Long-Term%2520Future%2520Fund&sort=round

Replying toAlignment Grantmaking is Funding-Limited Right Now

calebp993y

Alignment Grantmaking is Funding-Limited Right Now

(Speaking just for the Long-Term Future Fund)

It’s true that the Long-Term Future Fund could use funding right now. We’re working on a bunch of posts, including an explanation of our funding needs, track record over the last year, and some reflections that I hope will be out pretty soon.

I’d probably wait for us to post those if you’re a prospective LTFF donor, as they also have a bunch of relevant updates about the fund.

Announcing the Existential InfoSec Forum

calebp99

Please complete this form before 20 July to register your interest in attending.

We're pleased to announce the first Existential InfoSec Forum, a half-day event aimed at strengthening the infosec community pursuing important ways to reduce the risk of an existential catastrophe.

The forum will feature talks from infosec leaders across AI labs, policy and research, small group discussions and interactive workshops on real-world infosec challenges.

This event will significantly emphasise AI as it coincides with a big push at Defcon for AI model red-teaming. We think this is an exciting opportunity to share insights and updates from a rapidly developing space — both for those working in infosec in priority areas for existential risk reduction and those... (read 326 more words →)

Replying toTraining Regime Day 1: What is applied rationality?

calebp994y

Training Regime Day 1: What is applied rationality?

There are lots of possible goals. Some people are good at achieving some goals. Performance on most goals that are interesting to me is dependent on the decision making ability of the player (e.g. winning at poker vs being tall).

There is some common thread between being an excellent poker player, a supportive friend and a fantastic cook. Even if the inner decision-making workings seem very different in each one, I think that some people have a mindset that lets them find the appropriate decision-making machinery for each task.

To use a metaphor, whilst some people who can play the piano beautifully would not have become beautiful violin players if they had chosen the... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

calebp99

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

Long-Term Future Fund: April 2023 grant recommendations

What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair

calebp99

calebp99

Announcing the Q1 2025 Long-Term Future Fund grant round

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair

Long-Term Future Fund Ask Us Anything (September 2023)

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund

Long-Term Future Fund: April 2023 grant recommendations

Announcing the Existential InfoSec Forum

calebp99

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

Long-Term Future Fund: April 2023 grant recommendations

What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair

calebp99

calebp99

Announcing the Q1 2025 Long-Term Future Fund grant round

The Long-Term Future Fund is looking for a full-time fund chair

Long-Term Future Fund Ask Us Anything (September 2023)

LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now

What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund

Long-Term Future Fund: April 2023 grant recommendations

Announcing the Existential InfoSec Forum

Summary

Related posts

UPDATE 2023/09/13:

Summary

Introduction