Philanthropy Needs Ambitious Projects Immediately

Tens of billions of philanthropic dollars are coming, but we don’t know how to spend them well.

Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it.

Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic’s founders, and Anthropic employees.

A fairly conservative estimate puts the amount of charitable spending this would open up at around 50 billion dollars per year. This is about 1/2000th the annual GDP of Earth. US charitable giving is about 600 billion dollars per year—so this will increase total US charitable giving by about 8%. Crucially, many of these donors are interested in sponsoring high-impact charitable projects. Ransohoff notes:

$50B/year could fully fund the annual budgets of the following organizations:

• 6 Gates Foundations (~$9B/yr), or

• 67 Coefficient Givings (~$1B/yr), or

• 100 GiveWells (~$500M/yr), or

• 333 Arc Institutes (~$150M/yr), or

• 5000 Institutes for Progress (~$10M/yr)

Obviously, there are many effective organizations beyond those listed here. But the takeaway is that we are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb the money that’s coming.

Given this ridiculous influx of cash, the current priority should be ensuring that it can be converted into impact. This should take a number of forms.

First, we need a lot of new philanthropic organizations, as well as organizations that help facilitate the creation of new philanthropic organizations. Ransohoff suggests an analogue of Y Combinator for philanthropic start-ups. Similarly, existing high-impact startups should start planning for ways to use more money.

Second, we’ll need organizations that are capable of regranting efficiently. AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grant-makers (edit 6/2: though see also the comments beneath that post which explain that the bottleneck isn’t that too few people apply but that too few people have the relevant experience). There’s lots of money and few people giving out grants, in large part because the people who could efficiently give out grants are generally doing other things. Ideally, lots of people doing high-impact things should think seriously about becoming grant makers (apply here to be a Coefficient Giving grantmaker). Luke Muehlhauser notes:

As a new AI grantmaker at CG,^[3] you’d likely move >$30 million, and plausibly >$100 million, in your first year, funding dozens or hundreds of people to work full-time on projects we think will address catastrophic risks from AI. Because grant investigation capacity is tight, hiring one fewer grantmaker usually means those millions will just sit in an account for another year rather than being deployed to useful ends. And when a strong candidate turns down a CG offer, the result is often not “a slightly-less-good grantmaker,” it’s just one fewer grantmaker.

Put more simply: a huge amount of money will soon be spent charitably. To spend this money well, we’ll need large numbers of organizations that can use the money effectively and groups that can help get the money to the groups that would use it effectively. It’s especially important, as Ransohoff stresses, that we make it easy for individual funders to give their money in high-impact ways, without having to start a family foundation.

Good charitable organizations can help spare several animals from a cage per dollar. If you start an organization that can productively use funds on this, even if we outrageously conservatively assume that they’d otherwise be spent half as well, and you spend $200,000 per year, that would be the equivalent of sparing animals from hundreds of thousands of extra years in a cage every single year. Remember, the people who started the Shrimp Welfare Project are counterfactually responsible for sparing more shrimp from a painful death than there are people on Earth!

At this point, if you are interested in making a big difference with your career, I would suggest against earning to give, in favor of working for a philanthropic start-up. Founding one is even better—if you’re already doing high-impact things, you should think seriously about trying to found a new high-impact organization that could productively use funds. There are self-interested reasons to do this: with the new wave of funding, these are likely to be high-paying and exciting jobs. Jobs that are difficult, ambitious, and altruistic consistently are the ones that people enjoy most.

A while ago, I suggested that it might make sense to save your money and donate it later. I no longer think that. Given that much of the impactful spending opportunities will soon be saturated, now is a good time to spend on impactful projects.

There are also very strong moral reasons to do it—doing so can have ridiculously large impact. The last time new technology opened up this kind of money, it led to one of the largest declines in extreme poverty and child mortality in human history. The decisions we make nearterm will determine whether the current wave of funding has similar impact.

Here are some valuable projects that I think people should start:

• Navigating the intelligence explosion: My colleagues at Forethought have written up a bunch of specific projects for successfully navigating the intelligence explosion. These strike me as hugely impactful and massively underprovided. Think seriously about starting one.

• High-quality grant programs: ideally we should have more people start organizations that give out grants. We should have many equivalents of the EA Long-term future fund, Longview, etc.

• Lobbying organizations: these would push politicians on important topics like animal welfare, sanely regulating AI, and providing robust foreign aid.

• Building virtuous AI: current AI models are mostly being trained to be helpful assistants. But in a world of advanced AI, we’ll want AIs that are virtuous agents, not just assistants—building early prototypes of this seems valuable. This would be a good test case before handing off power to AI, to see how AI decision-making works on a small scale.

• Charity incubation programs: already there are some groups that help incubate high impact charity start-ups including the School For Moral Ambition and Ambitious Impact. Ideally we should have many more of these and the existing ones should grow. Some of the most impactful people I know have left specific impactful projects and are now trying to incubate other impactful projects nearterm.

• Growing EA: the EA community has been hugely impactful, but with the influx of funding, we’re likely to be primarily bottlenecked by talent, not money. Growing the movement, so that more ambitious and talented people join, is likely to be valuable.

• Animal welfare organizations: imagine having a hundred different organizations as effective as the top animal charities. The Shrimp Welfare Project has managed to help about 5.7 billion shrimp each year—imagine having a dozen or a hundred Shrimp Welfare Projects. This is the kind of ambition needed to take on factory farming, before it spreads to the stars and all is lost. Forms this should take include: pushing for animal welfare-improving ballot initiatives, welfare reforms for neglected animals like frogs and crabs, developing lab-grown meat, lobbying organizations on behalf of animals, and whatever else people can think of to help animals. Ideally we’d also fund impactful projects that can meaningfully investigate and improve the lives of wild animals.

Now is an incredibly good time to start working on a high-impact project. If you’re already working on a high-impact project, now is a great time to plan to expand. If people want to get in touch about working on such a project, send me an email at untrappedzoid@gmail.com or a dm on substack. Tens of billions of dollars will be spent annually on efforts to make the world better—let’s make sure they’re not wasted.