Austin here; I'm adding $25,437 to represent donations made in H1 2024 via Manifold's charity program at https://manifold.markets/charity/long-term-future-fund
The Long-Term Future Fund is primarily focused on reducing catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence and biotechnology, as well as building and equipping a community of people focused on safeguarding humanity’s future potential.
Open Phil is offering 2:1 ($2 from them for every $ from you) donation matching for the next 6 months, up to the first $3.5M from them.
We would like to fund the highest impact/$ longtermist projects that apply to us.
We will spend money to fund projects that we believe are high-impact, in a sense we aren't very different from Manifund.
You can look at our "What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like?" post to get a sense of what are likely projects for us to fund given additional donations, most likely marginal donations would translate to grants in the 5M tier.
The total funding target we're aiming for in the next 6 months is $6.2M ($3.5M from OP matching and $2.7M from other donors, including ~1M that is not matched). Note that we expect to get a substantial fraction of our non-OP donations from places other than Manifund.
Our current permanent fund managers are Asya Bergal, Oli Habryka, Caleb Parikh, and myself (Linch Zhang). We also have guest fund managers: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now#Our_Fund_Managers
As for track record, we've been doing grantmaking for a while. You can see our payout report (where we explain a subset of our grants in detail):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zZ2vq7YEckpunrQS4/long-term-future-fund-april-2023-grant-recommendations
You can also see all of our non-anonymous grants in our database here: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants?fund=Long-Term%2520Future%2520Fund&sort=round (roughly 10% of our grants last year by both number and dollars are anonymous; while occasionally this is due to infohazard reasons, the most common reason is personal privacy).
I believe we've given out fairly good grants before, eg to early iterations of SERI MATS, the AXRP podcast, networking events for digital sentience, and Joseph Bloom's initial alignment research. Also Manifold Markets. :)
Funding constraints: It may turn out that not enough donors are sufficiently excited about LTFF's vision such that it makes sense to continue on as-is as an organization. If this happens, we'll likely spin down to a leaner and more manageable subset of the existing fund.
Inability to find a fund chair to replace Asya Bergal: Asya is planning to leave in October to reduce the overlap between Open Phil and LTFF. If we do not find a good replacement for her, LTFF will be relatively directionless and would find it difficult to pivot towards higher impact directions
That said, our existing process is reasonably well-ironed out, and I expect that we'll still receive some great applications, our grantmakers can continue to display reasonable judgment and make good grants, etc.
Greater competition in the ecosystem: Maybe another group or groups (Manifund?) takes over our niche in the longtermist funding ecosystem, and do a better job than we do. Note that we consider this a success for the world, even if it's a "failure" for the project.
Mediocrity, operational and other forms of inadequacy. Maybe we'll continue to have a "good enough" project that chugs along and gives great grants, but we fail to live up to our potential by not taking higher-impact actions like actively soliciting even more great grants, building up relationships with new donors, trying to substantially improve the donor and grantee experience, etc. Most worryingly, having a mediocre product that's "good enough" might stifle or otherwise choke off competition.
You can also see the "potential negatives" list here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now#Potential_negatives_to_be_aware_of
Open Phil is offering 2:1 matching for us, up to $3.5M from them. We've received some generous donations from individuals since our fundraising post about a week and a half ago. We've also received promises of further donations by some large donors recently.
We will try our best to alert the community if and when our full matching target is met, however there may be some lag so overshooting is possible. We would still like to have ~1M above the match, but this is not critical.
Please note that we've given initial funding to Manifold Markets, the parent organization of Manifund. Thus, we ask the organization to be extra careful in how they discuss or promote us (eg lean on the side of not promoting us in newsletters, drawing extra attention to regranters or supporters about our project, etc). Similarly, we ask that any regranters who have ever received money from LTFF to mention their COI if they were to recommend a donation to us. We also ask regranters who have received money from us in the last 12 months, current applicants, and/or regranters who think they are likely to apply to funding from us in the next 12 months to refrain from donating to us.
Manifund Bank
3 months ago
Austin here; I'm adding $25,437 to represent donations made in H1 2024 via Manifold's charity program at https://manifold.markets/charity/long-term-future-fund
Linch Zhang
9 months ago
Please note that OP matching is over now.
Adrian Kelly
11 months ago
LTFF has funded many of my favorite projects (like Manifold!), and I'm excited to contribute to their continued grantmaking
Linch Zhang
11 months ago
@Adrian Thank you! We will endeavor to put the money to good use. What are some other projects you like, other than Manifold?
Adrian Kelly
11 months ago
@Linch Thanks! MATS seems extremely high impact, as well as funding creators like Rob Miles.
Marcus Abramovitch
11 months ago
@Adrian Manifold is, in my opinion, one of the worst grants LTFF has made. It's a private company that already had VCs/Investors. Why does it need charitable dollars?
Austin Chen
11 months ago
@MarcusAbramovitch Note that this was not true at the time that LTFF made the grant to Manifold (Feb 2022) -- we had launched just a couple months ago, had not yet incorporated, and the only funding we'd received were grants ($20k from Scott Alexander and $2k from Paul Christiano). The $200k from LTFF was a strong credible signal that the EA community cared about our work.
You can see more about Linch's reasoning for Manifold here. I think it holds up quite well (very biased obv), and I would be extremely happy if Manifund or LTFF or others in EA could figure out how to send six figures to similarly good teams.
One more recent point of comparison might be Apollo Research, which is also seeking similar amounts of grant funding while also thinking about the for-profit route down the line.
Rachel Weinberg
about 1 year ago
@Linch btw you need to sign the grant agreement before the donations go through (and you'll still be able to accept donations after that's done)
Linch Zhang
about 1 year ago
Thanks for letting me know! I don't actually know if I can sign on behalf of LTFF/EA Funds but let me check!
Callum McDougall
about 1 year ago
There are many great projects I know of which are applying for LTFF funding, and the 2:1 donation matching system is additional reason to donate.
Yashvardhan Sharma
about 1 year ago
The Long-Term Future Fund's grantmaking seems highly impactful, and seeing that they are currently underfunded is why I'm doing my small part.
Evan Hubinger
about 1 year ago
I have been consistently impressed by the LTFF's grantmaking and this seems to be a time when they are uniquely in need of funding (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRfy2Q2Pg25a2cHyY/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now).
I think my main reservation here is that it sort of defeats the purpose of regranting, since now the funding is just flowing to the existing grantmaking institution of the LTFF rather than the regrantor mechanism. But, while I do like the regrantor mechanism, I think that in this case the LTFF's funding constraints justify this grant.
I want to have enough left in my pot to fund any really good opportunities that might come up, but otherwise I'm committing the rest of my pot to this.
I used to be a fund manager for the LTFF.
Anton Makiievskyi
about 1 year ago
If LTFF were another regrantor with the 3x boost to any donation, that would have been so awesome. I mean if you agreed to add every project that you are planning to fund publicly here, so that everyone can see what is funded and hopefully get some report when the project is finished.
To be clear, I'm still donating to LTFF until matching funds last, it's too good of a deal it seems
Linch Zhang
about 1 year ago
"To be clear, I'm still donating to LTFF until matching funds last, it's too good of a deal it seems"
We do have to be a bit careful about what matching entails. I'm reasonably confident that the matching itself is ~2:1 (in the sense that OP will not counterfactually give us the money if we didn't get public donations). But the *altruistic value* of the match can be much less than 3x.
Any money we receive from OP ultimately comes from OP's longtermism donations budget, not (eg) Dustin Moskovitz's personal budget or Make-A-Wish or something. So the more optimistic you are about OP's longtermist donations per dollar (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/page/2/?q&focus-area%5B0%5D=longtermism&view-list=false), the less excited you should be about the matching.
Nathan Young
about 1 year ago
I think it's really cool that you've posted this here. Feels like helping the ecosystem be better connected.