@acmc you're welcome! I'm viewing this as a very cheap bet on someone outside of the standard EA/AI safety network, but otherwise with reasonable credentials, working in a problem area I think is interesting and important. For Manifund specifically, we're seeing a lot of AI generated project proposals, which is not disqualifying but can be a negative signal, and I'd love better, explainable detectors.

For fun, I put your app through Pangram, which flags your proposal as about half AI, haha: https://www.pangram.com/history/07a7f2de-1e42-4bd8-906c-8699f86061e6

Approving this project! I'm glad that @joel_bkr and others at METR are so excited for Sean's work, and from my perspective, this kind of active, expert-led, fast grantmaking is where the regranting mechanism shines.

I also appreciate Joel taking the time to lay out his considerations in making this grant, which are hopefully helpful for Sean and others in similar positions. (And @seanpetersau, insofar as you would be open to accepting more funding through this Manifund project, let me know; we're very happy to increase the funding goal on your behalf!)

@aashkapatel thanks for flagging, should be fixed now!

Approving this project! @RyanKidd I appreciate the particularly in-depth writeup, and also the fact that you referred this grant to @JueYan to get it funded; I'd love for more regrantors (and regular individuals) to be taking such prosocial actions in the AIS community.

I also personally think multi-agent dynamics are very interesting and would be excited to better understand that field; especially from more of an experimental/practical lens (like AI Village or Moltbook, rather than theory).

Approving this grant -- I've been a fan of Ink & Switch's UX work, and it's great to see them pitch in on AI safety too!

As a note, we've agreed with Jueyan to structure this as a loan rather than a nondilutive grant, to be repaid 1x (no interest) in 24 months, or 2x in case of an acquisition. I continue to be excited for Manifund to sponsor loans and equity investments, in cases where grantees are for-profits and the size of the grant is relatively large.

@Finn-Metz thanks, it's been great having you, Esben, and other Seldon folks and batchmates at Mox. Glad we were able to fill this role for you!

@AlexGajewski thanks! I loved the Cafe Calculate series you ran while at Mox, which likewise brought in a stream of interesting people. I expect your new office is treating you well, but we'll always be proud to have hosted Nonsense Factory Pantograph's earliest days!

@joel_bkr thank you so much!

(1) I'm very grateful for all the events you host! Especially for the live band karaoke, which brings such an energy and joy to the space. (And for completeness' sake, Joel also threw his birthday party last year at Mox, because his hundreds of friends would not fit in our house.)

(2) agreed on all counts!

• The AI safety community should invest more in SF, where the AI labs/startups/funders are. This was the original thesis behind starting Mox, and it seems just as true now as a year ago.

• I too wish Constellation would move to SF, and expect they would be the default safety nexus if they did move. We love our competitors! Unfortunately, from convos with Constellation people, no such move seems likely to happen soon (eg within the next 6mo), if ever.

• I do feel like we're falling short on some obvious good things from having a hub in SF, AIS happy hours being one such example. Some of this is because, at our current level of funding, we spend a lot of our time chasing random opportunities to pay our bills (eg leasing offices to tech startups). Some is from a lack of personnel; I would love to hire someone who deeply knows the SF scene around the AI labs & safety, but I don't have any such candidate lined up (please lmk if you have someone in mind). Some are just unforced errors, and we'll aim to do better in 2026!

Approving this project! (And per Jessica's request, I've lowered the minimum funding bar from $50k to $5k.)

@Corn Thanks Cornelis! And conversely I'm grateful at how you bring ideas like Taco Tuesday back and share them with your Canada friends. Bring them to Mox sometime!

(also: what are the other 2??)

@ollive Thanks Carolina! Really appreciate your recent volunteering with Mox, decorating offices and events, and just the spirit of exuberance you embody every single time I run into you

@mk_lao thanks for saying so and thanks for your donation -- we hope to have you back as well!

Approving this project, and making a donation to get this to its minimum funding bar!

Primarily, I'm donating based on Connacher's track record in the EA/AIS ecosystem. I also generally like demos/studies of multiagent interactions, as I think a lot of the future will be largely governed by such things, but most of our own experience is with chatbots or at most single agents.

I do wish there was a nice web UI for viewing (and playing??) the games, and also think that it'd be awesome to get a more complex but well-known game like Mafia or Secret Hitler implemented. (Though, take these ideas with a huge grain of salt; they arise from my bias as a consumer-product-person, and I trust Connacher has a good sense of what features actually matter)

I'm making a quick donation based on a good reference from @MarcusAbramovitch; he named it as one of the only projects that exists in the AI x Animals space, which I think makes this fairly neglected. I think the CaML's specific theory of change here is plausible, but I'm neither an expert in animal welfare nor AI benchmarks and am mostly deferring to Marcus here.

@jessicapwang Hey Jessica, thanks for flagging and apologies for the issue -- this should now be fixed. Please let me know (here, or via austin@manifund.org) if this is still causing problems!

@codercorgi Thanks, Alex! We very much appreciate the support and the kind words ❤️

Making a personal donation in support of this initiative. While I haven't spoken with Jessica, her track record seems solid, and I'm familiar with a couple of the folks who will be involved. Moreover, I'm impressed with the breadth of people who have come to express support on this project, which also provides some evidence that Jessica and SAIGE will do well at fieldbuilding. Best of luck!

@Haakon-Huynh Great, approved!

Hey, can you share what individuals or orgs are on this team (eg by updating your profile & project description)? We generally ask Manifund grantees to be identified in public, unless there are especially compelling reasons for pseudonymity.

Hey @Piotr, thanks for flagging. I generally encourage you to downvote projects which seem like cases of psychosis, as that will reduce their visibility in Manifund's homepage. Unfortunately, we're now getting enough cases of psychosis or other LLM spam submissions that we typically don't otherwise address each one; I encourage folks who might be in this situation to read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2pkNCvBtK6G6FKoNn/so-you-think-you-ve-awoken-chatgpt

Approving this project as part of ACX Grants, and making a small donation in support as well! I haven't donated a kidney (and am on the fence about whether I will someday), but am very inspired by those who have. And I do remember, back from my college days, struggling to gain weight so that I could qualify for double red blood cell donations -- so the core idea here resonates personally.

The cost-effectiveness figures presented are also compelling (though I haven't independently verified them), and I'm broadly impressed with Daniela's track record with other projects as well. Best of luck to Project Donor!

Approving this project; we've been happy to host the first cohort of Seldon at Mox, and I'm excited for more incubation and support in the space of AI safety startups. Finn and Esben are doing good work and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

Approving this project. This kind of biotech platform is a bit outside of Manifund's usual beat, but I'm encouraged by Aaron's donation to make this happen (I trust his expertise on this kind of scientific endeavor) and also Justin's past experience at Colossal, the company that de-extincted the direwolf.

Approving this small travel grant!

Approving this project, and making a small donation myself -- I've seen Theia's work before and was excited to see this pop up on Manifund. Thanks @joel_bkr and Charles for making this happen!

@Charlie as you guessed, in general Manifund is happy to extend trust to our grantees, to spend the funds by their best judgement -- so long as it's in keeping with our charitable purpose as a 501c3 nonprofit. Feel free to ask about specifics if you're ever uncertain, but we expect that we'll be happy with whichever project you choose to pursue.

Approving this project! I've been a supporter of Michael's past work (especially the SB1047 documentary) and hope that he continues to produce good videos for AI safety.

Approving this project and making a small donation of my own! Here's an excerpt from my review as an ACX Grants evaluator:

"I like this guy. I might be biased because he’s building on top of Manifold, but his product sense is pretty good. I’m not sure if making his current dashboards/systems better is the thing I would advise him to focus on, though. I feel like I’d really want him to work together with somebody else who has a strong concept but weaker marketing skills. (Maybe, with Nuno/Rai on Sentinel…?)"

Approving this project. Equistamp has been doing work with the most prominent AI safety research orgs, has been operating profitably by providing their consulting services. After speaking with Chris and Jueyan, we're happy to help them solve their operating cash constraints.

I'm also broadly excited by this model of supporting aligned for-profit work. As Chris mentions, we're structuring this grant as a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) investment with an $8m cap into Equistamp; proceeds (if any) will be returned to AISTOF's balance, allowing them to make further grants.

Approving this project and making a small donation in support. Like Marcus, I'm glad that Aditya is building upon our previous work around video cost-effectiveness, and have been impressed with his paper so far.

I don't have a strong sense that watch parties are the best way to continue gathering this data (naively, the seem expensive for the amount of data produced), but like Marcus I think Aditya's work to date is worthy of retrospective funding and am happy for Aditya to continue this project in the way he believes best.

Approving this project as part of our portfolio for AI safety research. I've heard good things about Inspect, and it's great to see that many different regrantors are likewise excited to continue funding this open source work!

Approving this project as part of our portfolio of AI safety research. Thanks to @Thane-Ruthenis for a well-written proposal, and to @CDBiddulph for providing initial funding and your rationale!

Approving this project as part of our portfolio of fieldbuilding for AI safety. Thanks to Richard for funding this!

Approving this project, under our portfolio of advocacy for AI safety. Curious to hear any more context @RyanKidd might have to add!

Approving this small travel grant!

Approving this small travel grant!

@casebash Epoch & Mechanize ultimately decided to place their offices elsewhere, but we would have been happy to work with them, and we're happy to have Tamay as a regrantor in our 2025 cohort. There's a can of worms to unpack here, but in brief I/Mox are not very doom-y, and believe that there are many different ways to do good for the world.

(I'll also be posting an update on what Mox has been up to, soon!)

@hijohnnylin thanks for the updates; it's been great to see Neuronpedia grow over these last couple years. For myself, I view this grant as one of my most prescient grants I've made, and I'm excited to see where y'all go from here!

Approving this under our portfolio of policy research for AI safety; I think better models and plans for post AGI labor seem good.

I'll note that I'm personally a bit skeptical of theories of change that route through "publish a paper", vs something like "get a substack article in front of smart people" or what Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson are trying with the Abundance book. But I can imagine that work on different areas of the research pipeline is important, and in any case Manifund's happy to facilitate this kind of donation!

@Veterinarians-For-Animal-Welfare Hi Sadiq, please don't self-promote your projects on other people's unrelated Manifund projects, in this way.

Approving this grant to help Sam get his funds sooner. I expect Marcus may have more takes about why he's excited for this; I'm also a fan of some of the writings on https://www.samstack.io/ !

quick notes:

• I love that Michael is willing to be so transparent and responsive here. The quality of comments here are great; thanks everyone for weighing in!

• I think highly of all of Marcus, Jesse, and Michael -- and even so, I think it's reasonable for them (and others) to have strongly different takes on whether a particular project is worth funding/doing.

  • I think sometimes EA people fall into a trap of thinking there's one "right answer" about cost effectiveness or theory of change, and we need to argue it out to get to ground truth -- and while there's some value in this, there's also a lot of value in enabling lots of experiments to be executed by the people who are most excited by those. Manifund is built around the latter philosophy: "let a hundred projects bloom"!

• As for myself, I funded this for a small amount, to signal support for Michael based on his past track record. I think the SB1047 documentary was well done (though, I was also a funder of that, so might be biased). I think the viewership numbers here are impressive, though I'm not super calibrated on what passes for amazing media presence.

  • Contrary to Marcus, I suspect EA ought to pay people a lot more, though there's a lot of nuance ofc. I'm also very sympathetic to viewing funding this as "retro funding for the SB1047 documentary".

  • My biggest question is whether short clips of existing content are providing value to the world; how much do you get to shape the narrative if you're curating vs creating? It's not a model I'm familiar with, anyways but I do think it's on the rise.

Approving this grant under our portfolio of AI safety fieldbuilding; thanks to Ryan Kidd for funding it!

@sheikheddy Thank you for this comment, I've just made a small donation in support as well.

@michaeltrazzi I really appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth retrospective! And I'm sorry if the presentation at The Curve slowed down the time to present this; I hope you still found value in presenting it there~

@Tebycimtime yes, sorry for the confusion in our interface -- the number $202 indicates your total donated at this point in time, summing up the $100 and $102 donations. You can also check out your profile for a log of transactions which display the two separate donations!

Hi Michael -- are you saying that the second $100 donation was an accident and you want to undo it? If so, I can process that for you!

Making a small initial offer in support of this project! Reasons I'm excited for this:

• Petr's past work with Dwarkesh is both a strong credential, and a credible signal that he can produce more films of this nature

• I am excited for gen AI reducing the costs of great cinematography work. My guess is that right now, this form factor is underexplored because Hollywood labor unions push against genAI

• Separately, I'm excited for alternate visualizations and ways of communicating concepts from the AI safety sphere; "essays" are a common form factor, but the general public consumes much more video content compared to the typical AI safety person

And some reasons I'm not (yet) donating more:

• Video content has been popular before on Manifund before, so I'm expecting other donors to also be particularly excited to fund this. I'm also not any kind of expert on video content.

• For now, it seems like Dwarkesh's regular recorded video podcasts are more popular than the genAI documentaries. (This is only a small update; I expect the a high rate of improvement on genAI vs regular, as it's a much newer field)

• Overall, it does seem like an expensive intervention ($2m), and this proposal is just fundraising for an initial demo

I also wanted to ask Petr about the nonprofit nature of this proposal -- should the feature film end up being widely popular and profitable, how would those profits be allocated between funders and the production team?

Approving this grant to support a promising individual's continued research and education. While Manifund generally does not prefer keeping identities private, I've corroborated with Jueyan on the details here, and consider H a promising candidate and agree that in this situation it's reasonable to keep the grantee pseudonymous.

(Just musing: in the future, one market-based way to thread this needle would be to charge a higher operational fee, eg 20% rather than our standard 5%, to price in our cost of doing pseudonymized grants)

@FlorianDietz Terribly sorry about the delay -- I've put in the wire this morning, which should arrive to your bank account in the next 3 days.

Apologies for the delay, approved now as part of our portfolio to improve animal welfare!

Approving this grant as a low-cost cheap intervention to spread high-quality writing on AI safety. Thanks to Aidar for proposing this and Neel for funding!

Approving this project. I'm excited that Manifund can help support more speculative and philosophical work that is generally neglected. I do expect that understanding decision theory better will serve us well as we move into weirder worlds; and on a brief skim, their decision theory benchmark seems promising. Thanks to Thomas and Lauren for funding this!

Excited to approve this project, and contribute a bit of funding myself! Sage is one of the few EA/AI safety orgs that can ship great software products. I've been a fan of theirs all the way since the Fatebook days; more recently, Agent Village has been showcasing AI capabilities in a fun, wholesome way. I think they have a very strong product & technical team, are still iterating to find "product-market-fit", but given their impressive pace of demos and releases I'm excited to support their work.

Approving this grant as part of our portfolio on AI safety fieldbuilding! I'm happy to see such widespread praise for Apart's work, and to see that Richard, Anton, Ryan, Soroush, and Gavin (among many others) want to fund Apart to continue with its mission.

Some reflections:

• Gavin & Anton have called out that larger funders seem not to be funding Apart. In my head, I sometimes think of Apart as part of & supporting a "shadow AI safety scene", my made-up distinction to contrast Apart and things like AISC, aisafety.world, etc from the "mainstream AI safety scene", which is more typified by OpenPhil, Constellation, MATS, and the AI labs. My sense is that the mainstream scene is top down, high-trust, densely-networked in the Bay (plus London, DC); while the shadow scene is bottoms-up, loosely confederated, remote. The mainstream scene takes a while to build up the trust to dedicate large amounts of funding to people outside of it; I suspect that's one of the key reasons for Apart's funding difficulties. Part of why I'm excited to run Manifund is to support projects outside the "mainstream" (where I/Manifold/Manifund began, and arguably still reside); I feel that Apart is in some sense kindred to Manifund, and I'm particularly glad we can be helping them here.

• I also just really like hackathons (see this), and so I'm glad that somebody else in the ecosystem is systematically pushing for more hackathons!

• My biggest uncertainty with Apart is that Esben himself is stepping back into an advisory role, to focus more on their new for-profit incubator Seldon. I'm excited for Seldon (we're hosting their first batch out of Mox!), but from an outside view, having a founder depart means that Apart now sits at a fairly critical juncture for having continued impact. As a funder, my best guess is that I'd prefer to fund Seldon over Apart (though I recognize that these cater to different audiences and funders will have different preferences.)

• My unsolicited advice is that Apart should try to expand their revenue base beyond soliciting donations, to encourage discipline, financial resilience, and incentive alignment. For example, Apart seems to do well at placing great candidates into new jobs, and a natural thing to do would be to ask employers recruiter's fees to fund Apart's continued operations. "Alumni donations" would be another angle on this, similar to how universities raise from those they've taught.

@wasabipesto brier.fyi looks fantastic, great work! This is the kind of core infrastructural work that helps inform expert forecasters, and also makes forecasting more understandable to newcomers. Visual design-wise, the diagrams look great, too! I've donated an additional $5k in recognition of the time & effort you've put into making this happen.

Also some quick feedback:

• The home page is quite wordy atm -- I'd suggest radically trimming or collapsing text from the home page, and letting the visualizations speak for themselves more. Could take inspiration from PlasticList perhaps, they put most of the explanation on other pages.

• Also, suggest shorter line lengths for readability, capping around 100 chars per line. See also these typography tips.

• I'm slightly peeved at how low Manifold currently ranks, but I'm hoping it's a kick-in-the-pants to the Manifold team to figure out why and how to make Manifold more accurate, and also signal to users which markets are less trustworthy

Approving this project! While I'm not very familiar with this field of research myself, Abram is well-regarded in the AI safety space; I've spoken with another funder I trust who was interested in supporting Abram's work.

I'm also glad that Manifund can help out here, by serving as a simple, low-cost option for fiscal sponsorship!

I've re-opened the grant application now!

@wiserhuman apologies for the delay on this; I've just put in the wire!

Approving this project and making a small donation in support. It would be great to reduce the amount of time I & others are required to sleep, so I'm very curious about how this experiment goes. I've also previously worked with Sam Harsimony way back when Manifold was first starting on charity prediction markets (it was his idea!)

Approving this project. As a sidenote, I'm very grateful for Gavin's clear writeup explaining why he wanted to fund this!

Very excited for this project. "Get people blogging about transformative AI" seems like a straightforwardly good idea. While there are already some great blogs out there (eg ACX & AI Futures Project, Zvi's, Steve Newman's), I expect there could be many more; the subject is vast, complex, with numerous niches to explore.

Asterisk also seems very well-positioned to run this. I think of Asterisk itself as one of the biggest wins in the space of EA/rat-adjacent public comms. Almost every single piece published on Asterisk impresses me with the quality of the writing and the importance of the topic, and so I'm excited for the writing that will come out of this fellowship. (I wish there could be an Asterisk-quality magazine for AI safety itself; if you think you could run this project, let me know!)

Finally, producing "writers" seems as (if not more) important than producing "writing". Even just for Manifund, we've struggled to find good writers who can write clearly & engagingly, and also understands the types of projects we fund, in the AI safety and broader EA space. I also expect many orgs have similar problems, and am excited for this fellowship to surface new talent to help with this.

I've put down $10k in support and hope others join as well; I'd love if Manifund could help Asterisk find more diverse sources of funding!

Approving and making a small ($1k) donation as well, as the priors on this kind of project seem reasonable (MATS mentee asking to continue their project), and Marius and Evan's support gives me some confidence. As Marius says, strong early results could encourage me to fund this with more!

@Connoraxiotes Just wanted to say that I very much appreciate this level of transparency and openness about your thinking & finances; I think it's super helpful for others embarking on similar projects!

Approving this proposal, and funding it to half of the total ask. I'm not personally in the target demographic (it's been a while since I've studied off course notes), I'm excited to fund this becuase:

• Michael Nielson and Lawrence Lessig are two folks I've long admired, and their support is a strong signal

• While I was not previously familiar with them, the team behind coursenotes seems quite strong, with multiple interesting projects to their name

• The design of the site itself is nice, and I appreciate the clarity of vision listed on their "why" page

Best of luck to the team!

(Aside, a minor UX nit: I think this is better as a single select rather than multiselect, rn almost no coursenotes fit the intersection of any two options)

Approving this proposal. AI Futures Project has been one of the most hyped efforts in my circles for a while now, and for good reason: it brings together some of the most accomplished individuals in the AI safety scene, working under a single banner. For this reason alone, I think the team is worth taking a bet on.

They've also already made their mark, with AI 2027. I'd gotten a sneak peek, and had actually been a bit unimpressed - I had high expectations, but imo the preview suffered from "too many cooks in the kitchen" wrt writing & site design. But by launch, AIFP had upped their game, with a polished product that's been well & widely received. It's certainly shaped how I think about the next few years of AI development. Kudos to the team for being willing to share an early v0, and then iterating to make it better over time!

I think the people working on this are super smart and probably know what they're doing, but I figured I'd throw in my unsolicited 2c:

1. It seems like the core team is already heavy on researchers, so it's unclear to me that hiring more researchers is the right strategic move, vs investing in roles that can produce great content for a wide audience. Right now their plan seems to be to partner with really great folks (eg Scott for writing, Oli for website design, Dwarkesh for podcasts), and it seems to be working so far, but I would guess that having in-house expertise on this could be super valuable, much more so than a marginal researcher.

2. Specifically with the TTX, I haven't played through one myself, but my understanding is it's currently costly to run (requiring an in-person expert facilitator). I'd be pretty excited for ways to automate that, scale it out, and get much wider distribution, eg by shipping an interactive web experience powered by LLMs, or packaging it as a commercial board game.

Anyways, AIFP is one of the most exciting efforts I'm currently tracking; I've made a small personal donation as a show of support. I expect that AIFP will be amply funded by larger parties like OpenPhil and SFF, and as Neel says, is not really in my comparative advantage; but I still think that independent donations are valuable for diversifying funding streams.

@jaiwithani Yes, that's fine!

@jaiwithani Yes, we should be able to do this for your SFF application; we've historically done this for one other Manifund grantee. Note that we would ask for 5% of the grant as a fiscal sponsorship fee. Email me at austin@manifund.org to confirm this!

Approving this grant and making a small ($5k) initial grant for support! Using AI to automate & speed up AI safety research is one of those proposals that seems like a no-brainer; I'm glad that the Coordinal team is giving it a shot.

As a caveat, I have not yet tried out their demo ( I'd encourage Coordinal to make one example output visible, so people without a demo key can still step through a tutorial!) I'm also not well positioned to evaluate the quality of the tool's research outputs, not being an AI safety researcher myself. However, Ronak (who works out of our space, Mox) seems competent and on the ball; the screenshots they've shown here look promising. I'm also glad to see that Jueyan and Ryan are supporting this initiative, too.

One note:

We plan on keeping core infrastructure fully private, and providing access to the system only to vetted alignment researchers. We're only open-sourcing the direct research outputs (papers, findings, benchmarks, generated code) rather than the automation infrastructure itself.

I understand the hesitation around open sourcing the core infra, but as a donor (or investor) I would be somewhat more excited if Coordinal was planning on open sourcing everything! I think most AI safety people worry way too much about dual use, and startups overvalue the importance of code as a moat; and on the other hand, people being able to learn from & build on top of Coordinal's work seems like it could meaningful change the trajectory of their impact.

Approving this grant as in line with our mission for funding AI safety technical research!

Apologies for the delay here; we were waiting for Ryan or others with context to weigh in on the grant rationale, which we still hope to have; but we want to unblock Francesca in the meantime.

@Greg_Colbourn oh, I just wanted to chime in here because I think "approving a grant on Manifund" can sometimes be mistaken for "Manifund or Austin directly thinks this is good", and I want to clarify our stance as a platform.

I don't have a specific scenario or mechanism I feel ready to defend at this point, with regards to "things will be great". Possibly it'd be good for me to sit down and write that out at some point? But honestly this might be less of an rational, debatable point for me and more of a vibe.

(Happy to explore this more next time you're around!)

@jacaissie thank you for the in-depth update! I enjoyed reading about the progress y'all have made~

Very grateful to say that we've received two large grants towards Mox:

• $250k from Craig, an individual donor

• $60k from the EA Infrastructure Funds (not registered here, but we intend to also register with impact certs at the same $8m premoney valuation)

With this funding, we're feeling much more comfortable about our ability to improve the 3rd and 4th floors of Mox; we're also now looking to expand the team by 1-2 folks.

We are still waiting to hear back from Open Philanthropy; and are still seeking more funding from other donors and investors as well. We think we could use up to $2m quite effectively, towards revamping and renovating our space (eg to support short and medium-term housing) and to run programs and fellowships here. It's been a great 2 months so far, I'm very excited for the upcoming work here!

Congrats @cameron! Great work, I'm impressed by the amount of press coverage (eg 1, 2, 3, 4) this has gotten; even though the AI research community has mostly stopped considering the Turing Test as a meaningful evaluation, I think a proper scientific paper that showcases this result to the public is super important!

I'm also grateful that Manifund got a shout-out here, it might be our first citation:

Approving this project as compatible with Manifund's mission of fostering education on AI risks. I've spoken with Connor and Mike in person and think they are taking a tactical and reasonable approach to making this documentary.

As with my comment on Dads Against AGI, I'd clarify that I personally hold some values dissonance with the grantees here -- for example, I mostly feel that AI labs, and their CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, are generally doing good work. But Manifund aims to be a neutral platform, where projects can express a variety of different viewpoints, and so we are happy to facilitate grants to this documentary.

Approving this grant, in line with our support of projects educating about AI risk. It seems like DAA has real traction and an experienced team behind it.

FWIW, I personally disfavor the tone that DAA uses; on a quick read, they're much more Pause-y and doom-y than I would endorse. (I'm a pretty optimistic person, and expect we'll be able to make all the AI stuff go well). However, Manifund aims to provide neutral funding services, and so we're happy to host DAA while they're pursuing their own 501c3 status. I also respect that Louis and John are spending their time & money pushing for the change they think is necessary in the world!

Approving this proposal! Expertise bridging AI safety to China is sorely needed at the moment -- I can think of a few orgs who seem to be doing good work in the space (Safe AI Forum, Chinatalk), but am excited for there to be more. Best of luck to Sarah and Jeffrey on this!

Thanks, @AntonMakiievskyi! Appreciate the support, and we hope to make Mox great for all that you described~

Approving this small grant towards translating EA concepts and utilitarian thinking to new audiences.

Approving this project -- my understanding is that Control is becoming an important new agenda, and I'm heartened to see this donation following AISTOF's initial seed funding. Curious if @RyanKidd has any more to share about what motivated him to make this grant?

Approving this grant to support independent work by Tyler John. I've chatted with Neel about the context behind this, and agree that it's reasonable to keep some details private around what Tyler is hoping to do.

I also think from an outside view, Tyler's past work at Longview means that we should be happy to fund some experimentation for him. I think it's a shame that nonprofit work typically does not pay well enough for even successful employees to take risks in their career, and hope that regranting can be one solution to this.

Finally, on the object level, I'd be excited by the prospect of a large biosecurity prize; I think prizes are still undersupplied as a means of facilitating great work. (I also wish someone would credibly try to manifest a large yearly AI safety prize -- if that is you, reach out!)

Approving this grant as a low-budget way to enable Matthew to attend this Tokyo conference and share his work.

Thanks! Grateful for both your donation, and your membership. One of the best things about Mox is just being able to bump into @saulmunn (and people like him) all the time~

@Maria thanks for asking -- if you add money to your balance, that would count as a charitable donation to Manifund (a US-based 501c3 charity). You can then spend that charity balance towards your choice of projects on our site; Manifund vets each project to make sure it is compliant with our charitable mission.

@manuelallgaier apologies, I've now deleted the other comment!

Approving this project as compatible with our charitable mission of furthering public scientific research! Tsvi has a track record within the rationalist community, and this agenda seems intriguing; I hope it goes well.

I don't know Scott at all, but looking through his website, he's previously received OpenPhil funding and won an ELK prize: external credentials that his research may be worthwhile. I also like the way he thinks, both here and on the Act I project -- it seems good to me to treat AIs with the consideration one might show a child or friend. (Indeed, one of my longer term visions for Mox includes something Act I-y, by having models be participants in the space alongside humans). For these reasons, I'm happy to support Scott with a small initial grant!

Constance is one of the most gets-things-done people in EA community building. I'm consistently impressed by her ability to bring people together & execute on ideas, and am excited to support her and her vision of an SF-based hub for animal welfare folks.

(conflict of interest notes: Constance is a friend; much of her outlined budget would be going back towards Mox, as funding for events or coworking spots)

@jlucassen Sorry to hear that and thanks for the heads up; I've now set this project to expire.

Approving this project! I'm also following @emiyazono's and @bengoldhaber's lead here and making a small donation, as I highly respect both Evan and Ben when it comes to navigating the AI safety landscape.

@Mikolaj-Kniejski thanks for the update; I've set this project so that it should expire tomorrow and return the offers to the donors.

The org that I'm most interested in an analysis would be our own (Manifund), haha. I'd also be curious about a comparison between the well-regarded orgs in the space, such as Epoch, MATS, Lightcone, and CAIS.

Approving this grant! Effisciences has a track record with AI safety field-building in France; I'm wishing them luck as they scale this up towards teaching on biorisk.

I asked Isaak to put this on Manifund as soon as I saw his proposal:

• I'm anti-sleeping-pilled: I think reducing sleep needs would be very beneficial to the world, and on a personal level have experimented with polyphasic sleep.

• Though I'm no expert in biology and have no insight on how feasible this is, I'm very impressed with the credentials of this team and their advisors.

• I strongly believe in Isaak himself, having worked with him on Future Forum and seen his trajectory since. (We asked him to serve as a Manifund regrantor in 2023.) I'd expect any project that Isaak's on to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

While it's different from the AI safety work that Manifund is mostly known for nowadays, ambitious moonshots like this are what I'm most personally interested in funding, and I'm excited to be able to support this initiative.

@GlenTaggart Appreciate the update! I'm sorry to hear about the burnout/covid/cancer, and appreciate that you posted about it rather than keeping silent; I expect issues like this affect many other independent researchers, and you speaking frankly helps others following a similar career path.

Also, in case it helps with your productivity: Manifund's starting a coworking space in SF, beginning ~Feb 1; you might enjoy working from there. LMK (austin@manifund.org) if interested!

I'm making a small donation to signal support of AI Safety Camp. It's clear that they have a product which is broadly popular, has a long track record, and comes well-endorsed. I'm in favor of supporting folks who have historically produced good work, under the principle of retroactive funding; it feels to me that the AISC folks deserve some amount of support from the community.

I do have some hesitations around donating significantly more, though:

• I don't have an inside view on how good AISC has been, nor do I know the organizers nor many past participants, so my decision here is mostly deferring to what I've read online

• I'm quite confused why other donors aren't excited to fund AISC. Last time for AISC 10, they ended up raising a fair amount ($60k), but this time it looks like there's less support. Is this because the AISCs have been dropping in quality, as Oli claims? Or just that they've been doing a less good job of "fundraising"?

• I'm specifically hesitant to fund the stop/pause agenda that Remmelt supports. For one, I don't like the polarization that the stop/pause framework introduces; and if I had to "choose a side" I might very well come down on "AGI sooner would be good"

• Linda, who I've heard good things about, won't be organizing this time around. (I'm unsure how much to read into this -- it might just be a vicious cycle where the organizers leave for lack of funding, and the funders don't fund for lack of organizers)

None of my thoughts are strongly held, and I could imagine updating to think that AISC deserves much more funding -- again, I only have very shallow takes here.

This seems cool! I'm not super likely to be able to make it given travel to Berkeley, but I like the concept and trust that Jacob & Rebecca will do a great job running it, so am happy to sponsor from my "warm fuzzies" budget (slash strategic sponsorship budget -- @Conflux would be obliged if you can plug Manifund & Manifest when you get a chance!)

@mariushobbhahn Thanks for the recommendation, this is very helpful. I've now funded the two projects to half of the initial ask ($4.5k/$9k), leaving room mostly because I don't have a strong inside-view understanding of the proposals, so would leave the rest to someone with more domain expertise.

@jlucassen Having both projects is fine! I just wanted to drop a link to your other proposal, in case somebody out there likes your work in general, but thought that this specific proposal was less exciting than the other.

(A combined lump grant to support James's general research projects is also a format we're happy to see. Splitting them up allows donors more fine-grained choice over which projects to fund -- though that's not always a good thing, as oftentimes the grantees have a better sense of where money should be spent, cf Paul Graham on "Donate Unrestricted")

Ah, right after I posted this I saw James also put up another project proposal. I have no inside view on which of these is good/better, and my grant is mostly intended to be support for whichever projects James thinks is worth spending this compute on. (If anyone with expertise in this subjects wants to weigh in, I'd appreciate that!)

I don't know much about James, nor about pass@k, but I enjoyed reading his retrospective on work at MIRI as well as the other writings on his blog. (I also appreciated that this proposal is written in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner!)

$1k-$3k seems like a very small amount to request, so I'm happy to speculate on getting this to the minimum ask. I would tentatively encourage James to ask for more funding, if there are other experiments that are in the back of his mind.

Hey @cameron, just wanted to say congrats on the launch! I'm excited to try and play this sometime.

I think restricting the time window to get real users simultaneously is an interesting design choice -- getting folks online together seems important, but it's a bit sad to have to wait to try out the game. I wonder about other viral ways of getting more users online: promote on Hacker News/LW/EA forum? launch to groups of people (eg classrooms)? "share with a friend" feature where you are facing off against the person you sent the app to?

@jsd I really appreciated this writeup! It's rare to see direct, public, measured feedback for individuals (especially containing critical elements), so I'm very grateful you took the time to do so here.

Note: I asked Elizabeth if she'd be comfortable contributing back 5% of this grant directly to Manifund as a fiscal sponsorship fee, which she agreed to; thanks!

(I'm currently thinking that the Manifund general policy should be to request 5% fiscal sponsorship fee from donors giving a total of $50k+. This reduces transaction costs for small grants, lines up with what how we've operated historically, and allows Manifund charge those who are being helped most re: 501c3 tax deduction. Of course, it's a bit awkward to impose a specific donation cliff -- I don't want to encourage folks to stop donating at $49k -- but I think it's a reasonably simple policy to work with for now.)

Approving this grant! Elizabeth has a track record of producing great, prosocial research (such as her analysis on Covid) and I'm excited to see what she works on with this larger runway.

Approving this grant! While it's not shaped like a standard EA grant, it seems low cost to try and I'm happy Benjamin is offering to fund this out of pocket.

Approving this grant! While this writeup is somewhat sparser than we'd prefer, Epoch doesn't want to be scooped on their work, which seems reasonable; they should be able to post more publicly once the benchmark is released (Leopold says "maybe spring for the pilot, more like summer for the full thing").

In any case, Epoch has done some of the best work in the field on benchmarking and visualizing AI trends; we'd be happy to support unrestricted grants to their org anyways. (And as usual, as part of our regranting model, we extend considerable deference to our AI safety regrantors).

Oh, apologies -- you will want to use the "Close project" feature so that the system stops asking for updates every 6 months.

Quick thoughts:

• I agree with Ryan that public impact analysis for AI safety orgs would be good (or at least, I would want to skim more of them); I'm very unsure if Mikolaj is well-placed to do that, since it seems like the kind of analysis that would benefit a lot from either technical AI safety expertise, grantmaking experience, and/or insider knowledge of the TAIS landscape. I'm also unsure if Mikolaj appreciates the scope of what he's trying to take on.

  • That said, I think the cost of Mikolaj trying to create one is pretty low, and generally encourage people trying to do things! I'm making a small donation to encourage this.

  • I would be more excited if somebody else with a known track record (like Nuno or Larks) was helping with this project; though on the flip side the overhead costs of collaboration are real so idk if this is actually a good idea

• I also don't know if cost-effectiveness is a particularly good metric for TAIS. Research fields don't typically use this kind of metric, where output is much trickier to measure compared to something like global health.

  • Because of this, I'd encourage Mikolaj to do some of this work in public, eg outline his thoughts on how to do a cost-effectiveness analysis and to do an example one, and post it so that people can critique the methodology -- before going off and collecting all the data for the final report.

    • Also: it's possible that much of the value of this project would just be doing the cost effectiveness analysis for one or two orgs where people have a lot of uncertainty!

@Mikolaj-Kniejski One more assessment you might want to track is Gavin Leech's shallow review of TAIS; I expect this will overlap somewhat with yours. It seems like you're aiming to produce cost-effectiveness numbers whereas Gavin is doing more of an overview, but either way it might be worth reaching out and seeing if you can look at an advance version, to deduplicate work or share results.

@NeelNanda The latter - PauseAI US has signed a specific fiscal sponsorship agreement where all donations made to them are structured as donations to our 501c3, and they pay the fiscal sponsorship fee on that.

Other grantees on Manifund do not pay any fee to our platform, as of today. Instead, we often ask large donors we work with (including the one funding your regranting budget) to pay an extra 5% to help cover Manifund operational costs; smaller donors (generally <50k in total, paying with credit card) we serve at no fee.

(I've been considering changing our structure so that all donations made through Manifund include the 5% fee, to simplify our offering/align incentives/make our costs clear; if we do this we'd announce it and make it very clear in our UI)

Approving this grant! I appreciate that the grantees and Neel called out the potential conflict of interest; Manifund is generally happy to have regrantors fund researchers who they know or have mentored, so long as the regrantor does not gain significant private benefits through this grant.

Manifund has now received @cfalls's $10k donation for your project and added it to this page!

I encouraged Tom to apply on Manifund after first seeing this proposal on Nonlinear Network. As I've previously written:

I don't know Tom, but a couple weeks ago I spoke with Lucie on the importance and neglectedness of AI governance in France. I hadn't realized that the next version of the AI Safety Summit was going to happen in France; this seems like a great reason to invest in the folks doing on-the-ground work there. In that conversation, Lucie made a strong endorsement of Tom's prior work; here I'm delegating my trust to Lucie.

This still holds true, in that my donation is not significantly informed by an inside view on Tom's work, but this seems reasonable to me for a cheap and time-sensitive travel grant.

@acdc0c63-8bd5-41b1-b4cb-19e5cb8da433 For what it's worth, I expect that Elizabeth (and Timothy) would also appreciate constructive feedback about what disappointed you, rather than finding it butterfly-crushing. They're planning on releasing more episodes, so if you can describe what you were hoping to hear, they might be able to correct and adjust for it!

Approving this grant; as I wrote on the EA Forum:

This looks awesome! $1k struck me as a pretty modest prize pool given the importance of the questions; I'd love to donate $1k towards increasing this prize, if you all would accept it (or possibly more, if you think it would be useful.)

I'd suggest structuring this as 5 more $200 prizes (or 10 $100 honorable mentions) rather than doubling the existing prizes to $400 -- but really it's up to you, I'd trust your allocations here.

Special thanks to Saul for setting up this page on Metaculus's behalf!

Approving this grant! As a note, Manifund is currently fiscally sponsoring PauseAI US, helping them receive tax-deductible donations while they are still applying for their own 501c3 status. In exchange, we ask for a 5% fiscal sponsorship fee, which also applies to donations made through this page.

Approving this grant as part of our portfolio for AI safety education & outreach. The University of Warsaw had not previously been on my radar as a source of such talent, so I'm glad that Piotr is aiming to establish a presence there (and that Jay is excited to fund this!)

Approving this project! As I wrote for the Manifund blog:

Gavin Leech is a forecaster, researcher and founder of Arb; he’s proposing to re-rerun a 2023 survey of AI Safety. The landscape shifts pretty quickly, so I’d love to see what’s changed since last year.

I'm especially glad to see that others including Ryan, Anton, and Matt of OpenPhil are also excited to fund this.

(I've also updated the funding limit to indicate that Gavin's funding needs have been met)

Approving this project! As I wrote for the Manifund blog:

Elizabeth & Timothy’s initial podcast was very well received, drawing extensive, thoughtful comments from a variety of folks. I’d be excited to see them continue this series, especially if they bring in folks involved with steering the EA community (like Sarah Cheng, who has extensively engaged with their points)

@acdc0c63-8bd5-41b1-b4cb-19e5cb8da433 thanks for following up; I would very much appreciate if you expanded on what you didn't like!

@Meme-trader hi, thanks for informing us about the $ACT token. We're not experts on crypto, especially not on smaller tokens ("memecoins") and the culture around them. My cursory understanding is that Ampdot has not done anything outside the bounds of what is typical within the crypto ecosystem, and I don't feel that any administrative action is appropriate from Manifund at this time.

In general, Manifund is not the right forum to air your complaints about crypto token prices not moving in a direction favorable to yourself. If you have concerns around someone's actions, I suggest you report that to relevant government authorities. (Manifund, of course, appreciates reports of bad behavior and will incorporate those we deem credible into our assessments of our grantees).

I'm very excited to fund this project!

• Important subject: SB 1047 was very high profile, generating a lot of discourse on how AI policy should be set. Even though it didn't pass, capturing that knowledge and sharing it seems very impactful, to inform how we as a society approach future bills.

• Great interviewees: I'm impressed that Michael has recorded footage with so many of the main characters of SB 1047: sponsors, proponents and opponents alike. I recognize and follow many of these folks, and am looking forward to seeing them speak on camera.

• Rewarding initiative: Michael saw this opportunity and then just started making it happen, without waiting for funding or approval from grantmakers. In doing so, he's taken on some financial risk, forgoing 2 months of pay and funding expenses out-of-pocket. He's now asking for retro funding, which I am very happy to pay down; I want to encourage a norm of doing awesome, ambitious things without waiting for permission.

  • I think the salary he's asking for is very modest, especially given his opportunity costs and the uncertainties/downtime involved with temp work.

• Investing in video: EA and AI Safety have historically been very good at communicating its message through longform essays (see: 80k, LW/EA Forum), decently through podcasts, but fairly weakly through videos. Funding this is also an investment in building up our capacity to produce more high-quality video content in the future.

My main concerns:

• Interest in SB 1047 might already be fading, and will probably drop even more as things happen in AI and AI policy. (This is part of why I'm pushing Michael to get out the documentary ASAP). Video production can take a long time, and any delays will reduce the reach and impact of this documentary.

• I'm not very sure what makes a video "good". At a glance, the quality of the production and the quality of speakers seem very high; but will the video itself be interesting? Will it be informative? I'm personally not well placed to evaluate this.

• Perhaps clips/shortform videos optimized for Twitter/YT shorts/Tiktok would be a better use of this material. Eg I don't have time to watch many Dwarkesh videos, but the short clips are great. Perhaps worth doing both!

(Conflicts of interest: Rachel Shu is my housemate and has done videography for Manifest; Michael has crashed in our guest room while filming this)

At @RyanKidd's suggestion, I've reopened this project and am committing half of the ask here at $5k. Looking forward to seeing this course developed and taught to students!

At @RyanKidd's request I've reopened this project for donations, through October 15.

@RyanKidd Thanks for the explanation! I liked hearing about how you felt PIBBSS differs from MATS, especially the points on supporting higher variance, bluesky research and developing folks with the Connector skillset, as well as your meta points about their funding situation (on a quick Google, they've received $240k from OpenPhil and $186k via SFF in 2023)

I thought this was a surprisingly polished project, given that Lucas has been working on this alone. I'm not sure there's enough of a market for such a data platform given how small the forecasting community is atm, but I appreciate the care that has gone into building this.

Approving this as part of our AI safety fieldbuilding portfolio! I appreciate the in-depth project writeup, and have heard good things about PIBBSS. (And as usual, I'm generally deferring to regrantor Ryan Kidd on his thinking behind funding this project.)

Approving this project under our portfolio of AI safety research. I'm impressed by the list of advisors (and appreciate that Beth is personally choosing to fund this!). I also think the pop-up campus is pretty cool, am very in favor of more events like that. Best of luck with the research!

Admin note: An organizer at MATS reached out to me about this project proposal, noting:

• MATS doesn't recognize folks as "Winter 2022 alum/alumni" for people who didn't complete the entire program -- as ampdot originally wrote, they only participated in Phase I. MATS suggested using "trainee" instead.

• MATS doesn't recognize "2023 shadow participation" - or thinks that implies more involvement than they're comfortable with. MATS suggested using "collaborated with MATS scholars and mentors" instead.

I messaged ampdot about this, and they were happy to update their language and apologized that their original phrasing may have confused some people.

Hey @Arepo, I wanted to clarify that self-donation was explicitly permitted in this round and I would not want to characterize it as defecting in prisoner's dilemma. From the FAQ:

• Can I direct my funds to a project I work on or am involved with?

  • Yes! We ask that you mention this as a comment on the project, but otherwise it’s fine to donate to projects you are involved with.

Of course, we at Manifund very much appreciate the thoughtfulness of people like yourself who spent a lot of time evaluating projects outside of their own! But in designing this round, we also wanted to include folks without much time for such evaluation, and just wanted to quickly give to a project they were very familiar with.

Approving as part of Manifund's portfolio of AI safety advocacy! I agree with Adam that one important way funders like us can help the ecosystem is by derisking charitable entrepreneurship through such grants.

@AlexL do you think this other funder would be structurally able to donate to Manifund (as a US-based 501c3)? If the only blocker to your prior funder was the fact that this was a grant to an individual, Manifund is happy to provide a lightweight fiscal sponsorship service now, and accept the donation on your behalf (and use the funds to replenish Adam's regrantor budget) To be clear, this is completely optional -- we're happy to proceed with this grant either way -- but helping your original funder follow through with their commitment feels like a better allocation of credit for this grant (and of course, permits Adam to fund more causes he finds important)

I don't know Tom, but a couple weeks ago I spoke with Lucie on the importance and neglectedness of AI governance in France. I hadn't realized that the next version of the AI Safety Summit was going to happen in France; this seems like a great reason to invest in the folks doing on-the-ground work there. In that conversation, Lucie made a strong endorsement of Tom's prior work; here I'm delegating my trust to Lucie.

@Textural-Being thank you for the testimony and the donation!

@Rubi-Hudson Congrats on finishing and submitting, fingers crossed that your paper gets accepted! (I especially appreciate the reflections on why it took longer than planned; I think this kind of delay happens a lot and I hope that other researchers can learn from your example)

@ampdot hm, okay, I'm convinced enough to add back your project to Community Choice. I think my cursory impression didn't account for how much Act I was about people talking to each other (& AIs), rather than just people participating in a research study.

(No longer necessary, but one kind of reference/testimony that would have been helpful here would have been some quotes from Act I participants about their experiences. You may still want to gather some to illustrate the value of Act I for other donors!)

@ampdot Thanks. I can see the argument, though it's somewhat hard for me to assess as Act I is an invite-only community -- and even if you gave me access, I'm somewhat uncertain that a project scoped down to a small number of invited participants fits the criteria for Community Choice...

Do you have more links/references/testimonials about your past coordination or community-building work? If that seems like the kind of work that would be eligible for retroactive funding under Community Choice, then I'd be happy to just batch that together with this proposal. (Apologies for the demands for more legibility, which I know can be annoying/difficult for grantees; we're trying to do right by the intentions of the Community Choice donor).

Hey ampdot, I think this is quite an interesting proposal, one that speaks to my personal interests; Manifund would be happy to support donations to your work as part of our portfolio of technical AI safety research.

However, I think this particular work might not be a good fit for EA Community Choice (and thus should not be eligible for the quadratic fund match). I've removed it from the category for now; I'm open to hearing why it ought to qualify but I'd be pretty skeptical as a baseline.

(Also: given that your project is already close to your original goal of $5k and you indicated you have more room for funding, I'd encourage you to increase your funding goal eg to $10k!)

Oh, derp -- turns out I accidentally set the project close date to Sep 2023 instead of 2024 in the database.

@ampdot Hm, somehow this project got closed accidentally -- I think there might be something weird going on in the backend. Unlike the majority of projects in EA Community Choice, this one was a legacy project that I re-opened; maybe something in our codebase doesn't like how I've set this up.

I've re-opened it once more and reinstated my and Kyle's donation offers; if this bug keeps occurring I might have to ask CEEALAR folks to just create a new project. Sorry for the technical difficulties everyone!

Hey there! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match.

Hey Yoyo! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our science & tech research portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match. Best of luck with your work!

Hey Aidan! Thanks for this proposal and congrats on the traction; it seems like many folks are excited to support your work. Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match. (People are still welcome to donate their funds to Pro-Animal Future, there just won't be a matching component)

Hey Melina! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match.

Per their request, I've relisted CEEALAR as a proposal to be considered as part of the EA Community Choice round, and lowered the minimum funding to be more in line with projects in this round.

Also making a token donation! I have not visited CEEALAR myself, but have been a fan of the concept since reading Scott Alexander's coverage of it way back in 2018. I like the ambition and would love for more similar endeavors to exist - indeed, I cited CEEALAR in the launch post for Community Choice as the kind of project we'd love to support. My biggest complaint is that it's just too far away for us Bay Area folks to come by and visit; to that end, if you're thinking about starting something similar but in California, apply for funding here or reach out to me at austin@manifund.org!

(I should note, Greg also personally invested in Manifold's seed round, for which we are grateful.)

The GWWC pledge was one of my first touchpoints with the EA community, so I was very pleased to see them join EA Community Choice! Taking the pledge is almost synonymous with the original conception of EA and earning-to-give, and I really like their basic product of "have a public website listing everyone who pledged"; simple and transparent.

For an org started in 2009 - an eternity ago in EA-land - they're a surprisingly live player! This is kinda vibesy, but while some other EA orgs feel pretty predictable & set in their ways, I like that GWWC is out there trying things. Recently, I appreciated their work around the EA Forum giving campaign, as well as the rebranding to the 10% pledge. Making earning-to-give cool again is an important and nontrivial task; I wish them the best~

(also, would love to do a joint Manifund/GWWC thing at some point!)

@marisavogiatzi Thanks, appreciate the updates!

Since demand for your work seems to be high (a great problem to have and it speaks well of your work!), I'd encourage you to consider charging EA orgs some portion of your market rate. Basically, use a (discounted) price to help you & EA clients decide how worthwhile working together will be. E.g. you might charge a well-funded EA org like GWWC 60% of your standard private market rate, or a new upcoming one like LIC 30%, making up the rest from funds from donors like here.

I've seen some other folks around EA start doing this -- for example, Lighthaven is happy to offer their campus https://www.lighthaven.space/ at a discount for work they believe is valuable (such as the very first Manifest - thanks!), but still charge some amount to offset their costs and make sure that the event they're hosting is producing value.

Hi Astrid! Thanks for the proposal; it definitely falls within our mission of advancing animal welfare, and I expect we'd be happy to facilitate donations to your work. However, it doesn't seem like this project is a good fit for EA Community Choice as it doesn't principally serve folks in EA, so I've removed it from that round for now.

Hi Kuku! As a new parent I am actually intrigued by the concept of a children's book for EA (I really liked Katja's https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/a-to-z-of-things and would actually just pay money to have a physical version of that). Your proposal is very light on details, though -- I'd encourage you to edit your proposal with more about your background and plans for this book.

Hey Jack! Thanks for the proposal -- I'm sympathetic to the ideas here and liked the concept of Semantic UI (though I haven't used it myself). I'm tentatively interested in funding a small amount, just on a personal level. Curious: why are you building this? Why would people use it instead of React/Svelte/other battle-tested frameworks?

Also: unfortunately, I don't think this is a great fit for EA Community Choice, unless you have some specific case for how this new framework will be used by many folks in the EA community. For now, I've removed this project from the round.

@wasabipesto Seconded -- this application is pretty interesting; I'd really love to see some names of EA orgs who have used your advice (or are on your backlog), and ideally links to some of that work!

Approving this grant as part of our AI safety policy portfolio, on recommendation from @RyanKidd! I don't personally have a strong sense of the merits of Future Matters but in situations like these Manifund defers to our regrantor's expertise.

(Ryan, could you say a few words about what you found promising about Kyle's proposal?)

@NeelNanda I likewise think Decode do great work; as I've mentioned elsewhere, both Johnny and Joseph are two of Manifund's standout grantees and I was excited to see them team up on Neuronpedia and other ventures. Excited to support this grant!

I want to note that the grant writeup here is a bit sparse -- which is okay, given that Johnny and Joseph have a proven track record and are seeking funding for a very specific task; but from a transparency & reporting standpoint I'd appreciate it if the feature dashboards/data for them were published and linked here once this task is done!

Approving this as part of our portfolio on technical AI safety research. Thanks to Neel for funding this and Alex for the writeup; I especially appreciated your emphasis on sharing credit in this team effort!

Hi Suzie, thanks for applying for funding. This project doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice as it's not aimed at benefiting the EA community, so I've removed it from the round. TBH I'm somewhat confused about what Hypermanifest is aiming to accomplish, but if others would like to donate funding to it then I'd be open to facilitating those donations.

Hi Deepali, I appreciate your enthusiasm for reducing animal usage in pharmaceuticals, but this project doesn't look like a good fit for EA Community Choice given its lack of focus on the EA community, and as such I'm removing it from the round. We are still happy to facilitate donations towards your work for its impact on animal welfare!

Per @ammonlam's request, I've upped the funding goal from $1k to $20k.

Hi Edison! I enjoyed looking through your overall portfolio, and I think the concept of Heartlog is very cute. That said, I don't think it's a good fit for the EA Community Choice round, since Heartlog's primary beneficiaries aren't members of the EA community. As such, I'm removing it from the round for now.

I'm still happy to leave this page up and facilitate any donations people would like to send towards the development of Heartlog; it just won't be eligible for the quadratic match in the EA Community Choice round. Best of luck with your work!

Hi Tom! Thanks for proposing this project -- it seems like a cool hard science project and I would be happy to see it succeed. However, I think it's out of scope for EA Community Choice, as the primary beneficiaries for this are not members of the EA community. I've removed it from the round for now, so it won't be eligible for the quadratic funding match.

Your project does seem to produce broadly good research for the world, so I'm happy to leave up this page on Manifund in case others want to donate to this research!

Hey Shannon! Thanks for applying for funding on Manifund. I think your project isn't a good fit for EA Community Choice, unfortunately, since it's not intended at helping people in the EA community. I've removed it from the round so that it won't be eligible for matching as part of that quadratic funding round.

However, it does seem to further the cause of animal welfare, so I'm happy to leave this page up in case people would like to donate in support!

Approving this grant! Timaeus was one of the projects our regrantors were most excited for last year, and I'm happy to continue supporting Jesse and the rest of the team on their work.

I also appreciate Adam's CoI disclaimer here and state for the record that we're happy to proceed in such cases. Manifund does not require generally require that our regrantors or donors be unconflicted when they make grant recommendations, so long as they make such conflicts clear for our consideration -- for example, we would very likely support Adam should he want to make a regrant to his own org (FAR AI) on a project that he deems important.

Hi Johan! Thanks for posting this application, I like the idea of an official university class on x-risk and you seem well-positioned to work on something like this.

If funded, would you be able to make the course materials publicly available for other professors and teachers to use? I'd love to see other classes follow your lead!

@DusanDNesic Thanks for the update -- I've put in another $1100 in continued support.

I am a bit concerned that low-level funding like this might be just enough to sustain your operations but not enough to lead to the kind of scaling/network effects that make a coworking space very valuable; at present, it seems like usage is a bit low. I would be interested in seeing the more ambitious ask; I imagine other funders, like Meta Charity Funders and EA Infrastructure Fund, would be interested too!

@Klingefjord awesome to hear that you're already thinking about this; agreed on tradeoffs you mentioned. Let me know if/when you're looking for investment too -- Manifund allows our regrantors to make for-profit investments in addition to grants!

I'm funding this project as it features a strong team, endorsements from many folks I respect (including Liv Boeree, Tim Urban, CIP and OpenAI), and investigates an angle that I'm personally interested in. I'm kind of a sucker for anything flavored "AI x Markets" (see also: AI Objectives Institute), and think that there's a large shortcoming in current social technology for understanding and fulfilling human preferences.

My biggest hesitation is: I'm baseline skeptical of a primary goal of producing research papers, aka I'm biased towards startups over research orgs. So for instance, I'd be more excited than I already am if the goal was more like "build an LLM coordinator that 200 people find useful and are willing to pay for" -- so produce a tool that people use and are excited to keep using. On a very quick read it seems like MAI's work on this project, if successful, could be extended in that direction? Like, if I was personally convinced an LLM coordinator could help me spend money better than I would normally, I should be willing to pay money for that service.

@c1sc0 Yup, you're fine to keep editing the proposal! Consider adding a changelog at the end to briefly document what and when things changed.

Hey Francis, thanks for proposing this project. I appreciate your background with software and Chalk Rebels, as well as the work-in-public ethos you have with your Obsidian notes -- eg it was cool to read more on your thoughts on AI Arena here. You also seem to be moving quickly, though it's only been a few days since you started on this project.

Since it's so early, I'm going to hold off on personally offering funding for a couple of weeks, but will be excited to read about any updates you have to share, especially if you find that people are starting to participate in the challenges!

@JJ Haha, I think it was a joke (see below), but in the interest of not confusing people I've removed those tags, leaving just "EA community".

@davidfriva Thanks for the update; I'm sorry to hear that you weren't able to finish your stated goals given the budget. Do you happen to have anything publicly shareable based on your work on this project? Even work-in-progress/drafts could be helpful for others who want to try something similar!

@SteveByrnes Thanks for the excellent comment and the donation!

I absolutely agree that LW and EAF nurture communities that don't exist anywhere on Substack or elsewhere; it's what keeps me coming back to both of them. My point re: Substack is that many of the writers who I follow (eg Scott Alexander, Nate Silver, Zvi) write for their own Substacks first; sometimes pieces get mirrored/linkposted to LW/EAF, but usually not. So both the top level posts, and many valuable comments, happen off of LW now.

One thing that might be cheap to try and very powerful would be for Lightcone to automatically mirror certain Substacks into LW, or easily allow authors to do so themselves. I believe eg Jeff Kaufman has something like this set up for his personal blogging. Mirroring comments (as Jeff does) would be a harder ask but possibly very valuable too.

Hi there, your project writeup for this is very sparse, and I'd encourage writing more if you're trying to crowdfund support for this.

Also, insofar as you're trying to raise funding for this anonymously, it might not be a good fit for the Manifund platform. In general, we have a strong preference for public instead of anonymous grants, and currently support anonymous grants only in special circumstances.

Administrative note: I've just transferred ownership of this project from @calebp to @Grace-Braithwaite, per Caleb's request.

Approving this project (apologies for the delay!)

Approving this project as in line with our mission of funding AI safety research.

For the record: 10 months ago, Fazl sought funding for a different project on Manifund, "Build an AI Safety Lab at Oxford University". At the time, there was a small kerfuffle, where @evhub ended up withdrawing his grant recommendation due to lack of time to further investigate. Since Evan is now recommending this $20k grant, it appears that Fazl and Evan have been able to sync up, and we (Manifund) are happy to proceed. In general, our policy is to extend significant trust to our regrantors in their areas of expertise.

Approving this as in line with our mission of advancing AI safety research. Thanks to Lovis and Neel for their public writeups on this!

I asked Constance to post this project to Manifund after seeing her initial report on AIADM on the EA Forum. As someone who has organized a conference very recently, I liked her transparent reporting on the behind-the-scenes execution of this event, and recommend that to anyone who is interested in running events.

It also seems like a shame that this event did not receive any external funding, so that Constance had to pay for the whole thing out of her pocket. I'm impressed that she went ahead and organized this despite lack of funding; it speaks to her conviction in the importance of her work. Though I'm very new to and fairly agnostic about this particular field (AI x Animal Welfare), I'd like to help defray her costs and reward this kind of resourcefulness by retroactively supporting the event.

Thanks for this proposal, Garrett! While AI safety is not my area of expertise, I've appreciated your presence and discourse across LessWrong and Manifold, and thus am making a small initial donation as a sign of support. I saw that you're also planning on releasing a LW post with more information on your work soon -- looking forward to that.

I've lowered the minimum funding to $25k as requested (since this project has received further funding off of Manifund), and am approving this proposal as compatible with our goal of nurturing the EA community!

Approving this! I think bringing together people and making new relationships happen provides massive social value, and am glad that these other donors agree. Best of luck with development of this dating platform!

Thanks for the proposal! I've been impressed with Shreeda's writing at Meridian, as well as choice of coverage of on Byrne Hobart, Emmett Shear, and Dwarkesh Patel. I didn't know she was working on this dating site and think it's an important problem to tackle.

I agree that design is critical for a consumer-facing site like this; it's good that you also recognize this. Right now, as a user I would immediately bounce seeing this front page:

as the general UX design and the animal avatars don't inspire confidence, and communicates that this is very much in beta. I would go so far to posit that design is actually a key part of product here, and I'm a bit skeptical that hiring somebody external to help a bit would work (as opposed to having someone with design chops in the core team).

As a funder, I'd be a lot more excited to fund this if you had lined up a specific designer who wanted to work with y'all on this. $1k-$5k is a very small ask, so my main question is on whether you have the ability to identify someone with good taste, and can actually convince them to sign on.

Another major thing that's hard about dating apps is distribution (this is partly what we found with Manifold.love). If you had any kind of proof that you would be able to get distribution, that would bolster this proposal a lot. Even just like, running in person dating events before your website even works would be promising.

Finally, I think you need a clearer story about what tiny audience you can bring on as a beachhead. Famously, startup lore has it stated that it's better to have a thing that a few people like a lot, than a thing that a lot of people want a little. I think that Manifold Love's early targeting of rationalist/EAs was quite good, and that one thing that tanked it was trying to expand too fast with things like online ads -- it just diluted the applicant pool. A focus on serving a few users very very well is a lot more important.

Cool, thanks for submitting this project, Caleb! Approving as being part of our mission of reducing biological GCRs.

Curious, did this originate as a submission to the LTFF?

Approving this grant; apologies for the delay! (I was waiting for Joar to create an account and then missed when he actually did.)

@Chris-Lakin will keep this in mind next time! Though, this distinction might be less useful than you think; my account balance is a combination of a $50k regrantor budget and personal mana donations from my time working at Manifold, but the "regrantor budget" is pretty interchangeable with "Manifund funds"

Approving this grant -- thanks to @NeelNanda for the very in-depth writeup!

$9K/month seems not crazy salary for someone living in SF, but I'd happily follow default rates for independent researchers if anyone has compiled them

Yeah - I do think ~$100k/y is the going rate for junior independent AIS research. I also think this is kind of low; I expect most people in this category eg to be easily able to get entry-level L3 at Google, at ~$190k/y total compensation.

I would also love a levels.fyi, or failing that at least an EA Forum post surveying what researcher salaries have been based on varying amounts of expertise.

@phgubbins That's awesome -- thanks to all the participants of the survey, and to you for facilitating this!

Approving this grant! I'm happy to see that Joseph and Johnny (past Manifund grantees) are involved with this.

I'm a bit surprised that Tom is not receiving funding/salary for his work on this as well -- I expect Tom doesn't mind here, but broadly encourage researchers to ask for reasonable amounts of salary from funders.

@Austin I also feel a bit obliged to list my concerns with Lightcone. These are very, very minor compared to all the good stuff above, and it's very easy to armchair quarterback and hard to actually do the right thing. But in the spirit of constructive feedback:

• The split in attention between Lesswrong, Lighthaven, and other endeavors across the team feels a bit suboptimal. I do think that individual initiatives are promising, and that there's much value of information in what Lightcone tries out, but the mark of a good startup is discipline and focus. (Me making this remark is very much the pot calling the kettle black, haha). Tentatively I feel like Lighthaven could be spun out as a separate org, as the skills to do a good website and a good event space feel fairly disjoint.

• I feel a bit weird about the opulence of Lighthaven. I have something of an aesthetic preference for scrappy/"ramen profitable", and it seems suspicious that work on this venue means that the Lightcone team spends much of their day lounging in paradise, like, maybe it'll make them softer or sth. (OTOH, this opulence has been quite good for Manifest; and I do broadly think optically questionable things like EA Bahamas or Wytham Abbey are Good Actually).

• I do feel less excited nowadays about posts and comments on LW (and even more so for the EA Forum). I think Substack has eaten some of LW's lunch; and there is something of an eternal September effect from new commenters.

  • I especially don't feel like Lesswrong is much of a "community", for me; aka not a place I hang out, more of a utility or place I get news. And I'm curious how true this is for others. Egoistically, I think Manifold does (did?) better on this angle; the flavor of Manifold is more fun, social, colorful. We're also just much younger and smaller, which help.

• FWIW, I don't consider myself a rationalist; I put myself closer to EA, startups, and on some days Catholicism. I think there are some serious shortcomings with the rationalist approach (overemphasis of individual vs group intelligence; analytic rather than iterative mindset; lack of warmth); the lack of successful rationalist startups is pretty damning. (Though, I do expect Lightcone to be robustly good even if you're skeptical of rationality specifically)

I really appreciated this writeup of Lightcone's impact and future goals. I thought I knew a fair bit about Lightcone given our past collaborations (eg on Manifest and integrating Manifold's markets) and convos with Oli, but there was a lot that was new to me here: counterfactual impact and growth from LW2.0, years and years of support for ACX and other rationality meetups, the Icecone visiting fellowship, Lightcone's influence on Constellation and FAR.

For now, I'm putting down $5000 in support of Lightcone broadly. I arrived at this amount by estimating the value of Lesswrong and Lighthaven to be ~$200/month to me personally; this seems quite reasonable given that I'm happy to pay ~$100/month for a membership at eg a climbing gym or The Commons. So with this $5000 donation, I'm retroactively covering my last ~2 years of usage -- approximately the length of time I'd consider myself to be highly engaged with EA/rationality. (I wonder if more broadly, something like a high-dollar patron model would help with Lightcone fiscal sustainability).

On Lightcone's future plans, I think the overall approach of "we're not sure but here are our best guesses as to what's good to build" is both good and honest. My quick takes:

• Lighthaven: we've made great use of this for Manifest, both last year and this. Lighthaven was counterfactually responsible for Manifest existing at all; the origin story for Manifest is approximately "Austin walking around the campus during an SSC meetup and thinking, hey, we could do a conference here." The Lightcone team is great to work with, in a way that I do not expect other venues to provide.

• LW as "the world’s best online research platform": I find the vision of to be pretty compelling. As a software person myself, I feel a little bit qualified to remark on website/engineering quality, and I cannot think of many sites that are crafted as well as LW; certainly no discussion platforms. LW is one of the few sites I have blocked on my devices for being too distracting for work; EA Forum (using the same codebase) is another -- testaments to the quality of the writing on these platforms.

  • I would be very excited to see Lightcone push harder on this vision. Some things that could be cool:

    • Incorporating payments and funding for good research & writing (patron/substack-like subscriptions? impact certs for prize payouts on the yearly review?)

    • Onboarding other scientific research fields and communities. There's still a long way to go before Lesswrong becomes as popular as Arxiv or top scientific journals. This would also put LW in the position of being able to make many of the long-complained fixes to science; one straw example would be replication prediction markets.

      • FWIW, I feel like the "clone and host a separate instance" strategy for ForumMagnum makes scaling quite hard; EA Forum seems to be doing okay but I don't know that the others are doing that well, eg Progress Forum is a ghost town.

    • Other experiments on better online discourse, similar to Discussions. (Also literally, just getting Discussions to work well.) Off the top of my head, there's no good podcast or video platform for this, which are plausible areas to expand into.

• "FHI of the West": This is probably where I'm least excited; though it's possible I just am not as impressed with FHI as everybody else, due to my own ignorance -- maybe "Parc" or "GMU" would be more compelling?

• Lightcone Chord: I'm excited for the thrust of this project; I think something in the space of AI-enabled coordination is going to be, like, bigger than (if not owned by) Facebook. Of course, execution is everything here, and on that it's a bit too early to tell.

Okay, I have set up this prediction market; let's move the discussion on operationalization there. I'm open to a cash bet of that size once we've figured out terms.

@vascoamaralgrilo shrug, once again, I think you're missing the point of Manifund (early stage interventions look very different than established ones; charity entrepreneurship charities might be a better comparison) and also missing the point of ACX Grants (which is mostly not to compete against GiveWell - see Scott's writeups and look at the other ACX Grants made).

I'm unfortunately not sure how to orient this conversation to be more productive here. I'd be open to a bet or prediction market of some kind like "will Alex raise further funding from an EA funder" if that seems cruxy to you. Otherwise I encourage you to come to Manifest, where both Alex and I will be; perhaps talking it out in person would be helpful!

@vascoamaralgrilo idk, I feel like we're drawing from pretty different worldviews here.

• I don't expect people like Alex to look at a complicated calculation that concludes "and therefore gene drives are 10x as effective as anti-mosquito drones" and think "okay, so I should drop what I'm doing and work on gene drives"

  • Alex might just not believe the calculations -- for plausible reasons! He has a bunch more insight into what's good about drones than an outside observer. I do think anti-mosquito drones have a realistic chance (eg >1%) of being sufficiently cost effective to be part of the fight against malaria

  • His current set of skills sets him up really well for doing this particular project; founder-market fit is super important in making projects go well

• I think you're underrating "because it sounds cool", I guess. To shore this up a bit more, sounding cool is an important factor in getting buzz, being able to raise further funding, get stakeholders to agree to participate, etc.

• I think the general approach of analyzing cost effectiveness just doesn't really make sense for projects at this stage, or is at best one of many different lens. Cost effectieness is a reasonable sanity check, maybe; other than that, I'd look to other signals like founder quality and project velocity

I agree with @alextouss; @vascoamaralgrilo, while I appreciate critiques that are intended to help out projects, I think your stance is unnecessarily combative here, or at least shortsighted/missing the point of Manifund. Manifund is primarily a platform for early stage projects, where there is a lot of information value to be gained from people like Alex trying new and novel things and then telling the world about their results. We don't generally expect interventions at these stages to compare favorably to established interventions like bednets on a spreadsheet (though it's a nice benefit if they do!)

I do also think that mosquito gene drives are extremely promising and I would be excited to see project proposals of that sort on Manifund -- if you are yourself interested in working on this or know of people are, encourage them to apply!

Reposting @louispauseaiinfo's response from Discord:

Matthew Taber, a PauseAI member who fostered the first in the nation AI safety bill (ELVIS; https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html) thinks it'd be OK to include some swag. We're only talking a cheap PauseAI-logo t-shirt, or possible a hat, for which the budget targets $10 or so. In either case, the plan included a formal legal review and signoff. If we can't include any swag that won't alter the offering much, but I'd prefer to include it if possible; basic marketing and all that. More generally, thanks for reviewing our proposal. If you have any further question, please feel free to ask. I can be most-conveniently reached at louis@pauseai.info.

@Holly_Elmore Hey Holly! Thanks for the update; sorry to be catching you a bit late, but have you found a fiscal sponsor yet?

I'm not sure what degree of support you're looking for from a sponsor, but Manifund is generally happy to be a lightweight fiscal sponsor -- basically, accept donations via 501c3, then forwarding funds to the grantees. I believe we have the lowest sponsorship fees in the industry at 5%, though we also provide no additional services; you're on your own for payroll, taxes, etc. Unsure if we ourselves have the "credibility" you are looking for, though sometimes we get to borrow on the credibility of our AI Safety regrantors or partners like Scott Alexander. Let me know if you're interested, you can also reach me at austin@manifund.org!

@cfalls haha yeah, for cases like this we function as a DAF ourselves (albeit one that primarily supports EA and adjacent projects instead of "all other 501c3s"; provides fiscal sponsorship for individuals/orgs like MATS; and also hosts programs like ACX Grants).

I wasn't aware that BERI would also facilitate this for MATS, good to know!

@cfalls Hi Craig! I'm not sure that MATS is a 501c3, but Manifund is, and we're able to accept DAF payments on their behalf and forward the funds to them. (We do ask for DAF payments to clear a $5k minimum donation, however, due to the operational cost of processing these.) If you're interested, see instructions here.

I'm matching the existing donations for another $350, to get this project across its minimum bar, and based on the testimonials from Lorenzo and Jeroen. (I also very much appreciate that Zian found time for a 30m user interview call to provide feedback on Manifund and teach us a bit about the needs of EA Philippines.)

@Adrian-Regenfuss thank you for the update and for the intention to return the funds; I'll follow up with information on how to do that. And congrats on the new job!

Hi Jeroen! I wanted to thank you for taking the time to post this application. I don't watch much in the way of videos, but I did play through a chunk of your lead poisoning video and found it well-produced and informative. Best of luck towards hitting your funding goal!

I'm funding this up to the minimum funding bar, based on:

1. Having met @luiscostigan and hearing about the work of AI Safety Tokyo, while visiting earlier this January

2. The prominence of the TAIS Conference in Tokyo -- the fact that two of Manifund's AI Safety regrantors ( @DanHendrycks and @RyanKidd ) are going, and that Scott reposted about it on his most recent open thread, are both strong signals of the conference's value.

3. Holding regular weekly study sessions might seem like a small thing, but I really respect the dedication it shows!

I'm happy to buy this as retroactive impact certificate; I don't know if the large retro funders in this round are excited to buy back first-year impact (I hope they will be!), but either way I want to support this work.

Crossposting some notes on this project! First a tweet from @toby, explaining his decision to fund this project:

Since we worked on a review of Optimism's RGPF design I am interested to see how the new Manifund social impact certs/bonds will work. I applied to be a regranter on this thing and spent all my funds on Jessica's project to start a journal focused on paradigm development in psychiatry. It's a very important project and totally tracks with my goals for Care Culture.

I would encourage other regranters to also consider funding this. It's well outside of classic EA / rationalist thinking. It's not problem with a very clear in-out impact model, personnel and scenius development will be the decisive factor. It matters to have Jess working on this!

And second an endorsement from @lily, also posted in our newsletter:

Jessica’s project takes up the mantle of a favorite crusade of mine, which is “actually it was a total mistake to apply the scientific method to psychology, can we please do something better.” She’s written extensively on psychiatric crises and the mental health system, and I would personally be excited to read the work of people thinking seriously about an alternative paradigm. I’m not sure whether the journal structure will add anything on top of just blogging, but I’d be interested to see the results of even an informal collaboration in this direction.

(Note that I probably wouldn’t expect the SFF or LTFF to fund this; ACX Grants 2025 maybe, and the EAIF I’m not sure. But I’d be happy to see something like it exist.)

@briantan appreciate the update, especially how in-depth it is; this looks like good progress and I'm excited for the rest of your program!

I really like that Cam has already built & shipped this project, and it appears to have gotten viral traction and had to be shut down due to costs; rare qualities for a grant proposal! The project takes a very simple premise and executes well on it; playing with the demo makes me want to poke at the boundaries of AI, and made me a bit sad that it was just an AI demo (no chance to test my discernment skills); I feel like I would have shared this with my friends, had this been live.

Research on AI deception capabilities will be increasingly important, but also like that Cam created a fun game that interactively helps players think a bit about how for the state of the art has come, esp with the proposal to let user generate prompts too!

I like this project because the folks involved are great. Zvi is famous enough to almost not need introduction, but in case you do: he's a widely read blogger whose coverage of AI is the best in the field; also a former Magic: the Gathering pro and Manifund regrantor. Meanwhile, Jenn has authored a blog post about non-EA charities that has significantly shaped how I think about nonprofit work, runs an awesome meetup in Waterloo, and on the side maintains this great database of ACX book reviews. (seriously, that alone is worth the price of admission)

I only have a layman's understanding of policy, economics or academia (and am slightly bearish on the theory of change behind "publish in top journals") but I robustly trust Zvi and Jenn to figure out what the right way to move forward with this.

Brandon walks the walk when it comes to education; his ACX Book Review contest entry on the subject was not only well written, but also well structured with helpful illustrations and different text formats to drill home a point. (And the fact that he won is extremely high praise, given the quality of the competition!) I'm not normally a fan of educational interventions as their path to impact feels very long and uncertain, but I'd be excited to see what Brandon specifically can cook up.

(Disclamer: I, too, have some skin in the game, with a daughter coming out in ~July)

@DrAmbreenDeol awesome, thanks for the response! I've now approved your project.

Hi @DrAmbreenDeol! Thank you for submitting this proposal; it's notable that @Kunvar is excited for this and offering $8.5k for this study.

We'll most likely be able to approve as within the bounds of our 501c3 mission, but there's two pieces of information that we're missing (questions that we ask as part of our standard grant proposal):
1) Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

2) What other funding are you or your project getting?

This was one of the grants I had feedback on during the initial review process, reposting here:

FWIW, I was pretty impressed with the quality of Fluidity Forum speakers & attendees (eg Jane Flowers, Milan Griffes, AKC). Unfortunate that it overlapped with Manifest 2023 :'(. I would be tentatively interested in seeing the videos, but this might be just aspirational - I haven't even made it through the backlog of Manifest videos.

I gave this a grant a 3 on Scott's 0-4 scale: "Good, plausible grant: recommend if money available and further research is positive"

Approving this grant as in line with our work towards funding research on AI safety!

The process for this grant was a bit unusual - instead of the grant being initiated by the grantee, Jueyan approached us asking if we would be willing to fiscally sponsor this. After looking into this researcher's background and work, we decided that it would be in line with our normal area of charitable work, and agreed to facilitate this (with a 5% fiscal sponsorship fee.)

Jueyan expressed an interest in getting this grant out the door ASAP, which is why there's only the one-sentence description for now; he's offered to put in a longer writeup later.

I asked a friend with more bio expertise to take a look, here was the feedback:

1. I need to see the other BLAST results, because the legionella one seems cherry picked. I'd need to see if there are other proteins that are closer matches that he ignored because he couldn't come up with a hypothesis for them.

2. The BLAST result doesn't seem great even out of context. A short sequence with 2 mismatches and 2 gaps is not a great match. If he could show the 3D structure is similar that would be a good next step, but as is it's not great.

3. He has good epidemiological data for T1D but relies on random news stories and an out of context journal article for his Legionella's prevalence. He would need to come up with some comparable maps of Legionella's prevalence and show they line up in some way.

4. These graphs don't match up and he doesn't have a good explanation.

Hi Stephen, thanks for submitting this project! Bio funding is very much outside my personal area of expertise, but I'll ask around and see if anyone in the field might be willing to lend their eyes on reviewing this.

To set expectations: we haven't issued regrantor budgets for 2024 yet, as we're still fundraising ourselves. It's a shame that this proposal missed the recent ACX Grants round, as it would have been a great fit - but with the upcoming ACX Grants Impact Certs side, there may be an influx of bio-curious investors/donors interested in this.

Also, I really enjoyed the bits of humor in your proposal - as someone who's fallen backwards into reading lots of these things, it's so nice when a proposal is a delight to read on its own.

@wasabipesto for some context, SirCryptomind was asking whether Manifold could hire him for his moderation work; while we didn't want to bring on an ongoing, fulltime paid position for this at the moment, I encouraged him to submit an entry for retroactive funding for his mod work as part of the Community Fund. The community fund hasn't paid out our third round yet and I expect SirCryptomind's work to fall within scope for this.

Funded this with $2.5k and approving this! This falls within the category of "encourage interesting scientific experiments" and is low-budget, so it's a cheap bet to see what this team can accomplish. I'm glad they are releasing their work as open source too (though would love to see a link somewhere!)

I'm donating a token amount for now to signal interest, and get this project across its minimum funding bar. I have not listened much to The Inside View, but the guests Michael have attracted are quite good (eg recently Manifund regrantor @evhub and grantee @Holly_Elmore). The production quality seems pretty good at a glance (with editing & transcripts available). I also really like that Michael has also been consistently doing these for a year; I could imagine wanting to fund this project a lot more, upon further research or testimonials.

My primary misgivings are the low-ish view counts on Youtube, and uncertainty on whether Michael's videos have been helpful for others - this is where more testimonials like Cameron's are helpful!

Reposting my notes on this while evaluating for ACX:

Okay so Scott put "Ask Austin?" for this, but really I feel much more qualified to evaluate software/startup proposals rather than forecasting ones. Also despite founding a prediction market startup, I'm not, like, an inherent cheerleader for forecasting, and actually have some deep skepticisms about the viability of Tetlock-style "forecasting for government policy"; such approaches seem sexy but like, if corporations aren't effectively using forecasting internally, I'm skeptical that the govt will be able to do so too.

So with those biases in mind: I'm not especially excited by the proposal, but if anyone seems like the right person to do this kind of thing, it seems like S has the right background for it. I would be extremely happy if they succeeded at convincing policymakers to take forecasts more seriously. The win condition would be similar to that from Dylan Matthew's talk at Manifest: legitimizing forecasts in the eyes of people who work on policy. My hesitancies are 1) I'm not sure if funding this would make such adoption likely to happen (it seems like a long shot), and 2) as above, I'm not even that sure that such adoption would be significantly beneficial to the world.

My comments as an ACX evaluator:

I like Tetra a lot, based on their writing and Manifold usage; I strongly considered offering them a Manifund regrantor budget (and would have done this if our overall budget pool was like 20% larger). That said, I'm a bit skeptical that 1) assurance contracts are a huge unmet need, or 2) they'll be able to create a sufficiently-nice-looking platform. I think "platform that looks nice" is actually very tricky but also necessary for wide adoption.

(I'd feel much better about point 2 if they would pair up with someone whose specialty is web design)

Since then it looks like Tetra is working with Jordan of Spartacus, which seems like a great fit (I would have suggested this if Scott didn't)! I'm a little unsure if "jam two people with no prior experience of collaborating" will actually work well, but tbh this kind of describes me and James/Stephen prior to ACX Grants, so there's at least some precedent. Best of luck!

Approving this project as in line with our work on AI Safety! I think this is a pretty compelling writeup, and a few people who I trust are vouching for the organizers.

Notably, Remmelt and Linda made an excellent fundraising appeal on EA Forum -- they were very successful at turning past successes into a concrete appeal for funding, drawing in donations from many members of the EA community, rather than a single large donations from established funders. I'm very happy that Manifund can help with this kind of diversified fundraising. (I also appreciate that Linda has written up recommendations for other projects she finds compelling, including some on our site!)

@josephbloom Thanks for posting this update! Your grant was one of the very first grants made through Manifund's regranter program, and I'm quite happy to see your follow ups. I especially appreciate you staying in touch with Marcus and Dylan to give them a sense of how their grants are being used as well as your next research steps.

re: compute funding, I imagine you've already seen Superalignment Fast Grants; it seems like a good fit for your ask and I'd highly encourage you to apply (Leopold, who I believe is running the program, is also a Manifund regrantor!)

@NeoOdysseus I've lowered your minimum funding requirement to $2,500, as requested.

Hi Claire! Just wanted to note that Athena looks super cool, and I'm glad Evan Hubinger seems to think so as well. Successfully building out a mentorship program and support network can be tricky, especially to establish something with lasting impact; I'm happy to see that you have many different kinds of relevant experience. Hoping to see you succeed here, and let us know if we can help!

Approving this project; echoing Greg, I think AI Plans has made good progress (eg with its site design) since I last saw them. I also like some of the judges they chose for their December critique-athon, such as Nate Soares and Tetraspace.

Approving this project as appropriate under our charitable mission in the cause area of AI Governance. It's good to see the endorsements from @ZachSteinPerlman and tentatively @MarcusAbramovitch, as two people who I think are very clued-in to this space!

Approving this project as fitting within our charitable mission in the forecasting cause area! I've previously spoken with Marcel van Diemen before, who struck me as very motivated and entrepreneurial. I think Base Rate Times started very strong right out the gate -- it got a lot of retweets and mentions on EA/rat twitter, which is rare for a forecasting project. My major area of concern is that I'm not yet sold on whether there is repeated demand for the BRT form factor, vs just a novelty thing that gets linked to once and then not checked in the future. In any case, best of luck with BRT!