Increased Availability and Willingness for Deployment of Resources for Effective Altruism and Long-Termism

In the last few months, there have been several indicators of a dramatic increase of resources available from a number of organizations in effective altruism, in particular for the focus area of EA community/​infrastructure building and long-termism. This includes not only financial resources for typical grant-making but also for research fellowships and scholarships from newer funding sources, as well as different kinds of institutional support and career opportunities. This list isn’t a call for applications or requests at this time from any of the organizations in question. This is only a summary of recent developments so the EA community at large is aware of these opportunities and changes for the purpose of strategic decision-making.

• Benjamin Todd, CEO of 80,000 Hours, made the case for why EA needs ‘mega-projects’ i.e., projects that can deploy up to $100 million per year.

• The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has dramatically grown in the last year, nearly doubling in staff.

• Rethink Priorities has also doubled their team and is looking to expand further.

• The EA Infrastructure Fund expects the total that will be granted in 2021 will exceed $5 million, more than 2.7x the total granted in 2020, and 1.3x has awarded in all previous years (2018-2020) combined, and that they expect to be able to make these funding needs.

• The Survival and Flourishing Fund deployed approximately $19 million in 2021 vs. $5.4 million in 2020.

• Vitalik Buterin, founder of the blockchain platform Ethereum, donated $25 million to the Future of Life Institute to support research activities such as Ph.D. scholarships.

• Lightcone Infrastructure, now the parent organization for rationality community blog LessWrong, is now hiring new staff with salaries of $150-200 thousand dollars.

• The Effective Altruism Forum recently held a creative writing contest that rewarded $20 thousand total the winners.

• AI safety and research company Anthropic has raised $124 million in a Series A funding round.

• Community member Sam Bankman-Fried is now the richest person under 30 and the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, FTX, is now offering EA fellowships.

• The CEA is launching Campus Centers at top universities and is expecting some of these centers to be spending millions of dollars per year within the next few years. Beyond this, local groups funding is becoming much more accessible from either the CEA or the Global Challenges Project.

• Open Philanthropy is more heavily investing in outreach projects and has announced Early Career Funding for Improving the Long-Term Future, biosecurity scholarships and tech policy fellowships.

• Popular blogger and EA community member Scott Alexander through his blog, Astral Codex Ten, and the community around it is overseeing $1.5 million worth of grant-making.*Thanks to Chris Leong for helping collate the above information and resources. *