14 Comments
User's avatar
Jerry's avatar

There's also a chicken/egg problem here. The level of funding you're talking about isn't there yet, and founding without funding is very difficult. For example, Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML, compassionml.com) is doing a ton of great work but they're barely getting by when it comes to funding

Jerry's avatar

You should read the comments of the article you cite as saying we're bottlenecked on grantmakers. Given how many very talented people are applying, I find posts like that quite lame.

Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Thanks, added a clarification.

Silas Abrahamsen's avatar

Very cool! Do you think this will decrease the marginal impact of personal charitable donations?

Sergio Diaz's avatar

Hey Matthew, what kind of skills should someone have/what should their competitive advantage be to become a grant maker?

Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Generally only open to those with a number of years of experience.

Sergio Diaz's avatar

I'm moving the question back a step then: what is the path to becoming a grant maker, and what kind of skills allow someone to succeed on that path? (I have some ideas, of course, but I wanted to know what you thought)

Ariel Simnegar 🔸's avatar

Do you think animal welfare / digital minds will really see a substantial increase in funding, or just global health and AI safety? Because excepting animal-pilled EAs at Anthropic, these funding sources don’t make me bullish about increased funding for those neglected cause areas.

This matters because if one would be earning to give for AI safety, I’d see your point, but I’m not sure earning to give for animal welfare / digital minds is suboptimal just yet.

Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I think a lot will go to animals from the Anthropic people.

Ariel Simnegar 🔸's avatar

I hope you’re right, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Lightcone's avatar

I think there are increasing returns to posting often. The people on substack I tend to start liking the most are often the ones who post the most often

Michael Plymouth's avatar

I want to cover the whole world with plastic wrap. Who wants to fund me?

not Bob Cobb's avatar

So it's very likely that Anthropic will OpenAI will IPO within a year?