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EA Organization Updates: December 2023
8 min readDec 22, 2023
We’re featuring some opportunities and job listings at the top of this post. Some have (very) pressing deadlines.
Fellowships, programs, and workshops
Call to action
Anthropic
ARC Evals (now METR)
Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
BlueDot Impact
Cooperative AI Foundation
Charity Entrepreneurship & Giving What We Can
Our World in Data (OWID)
80,000 Hours is in the process of hiring a new CEO. The deadline for applications has passed, but the post also discusses other potential vacancies.
On The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Luisa interviewed:
And Rob interviewed:
On 80k After Hours, Rob spoke with the organisation’s founder Benjamin Todd about the history of 80,000 Hours.
They also released a blog appreciating their readers’ efforts to help others.
Animal Charity Evaluators has released their 2023 Charity Recommendations! After several months of evaluating animal advocacy organizations, they’ve identified 11 charities that can achieve the most significant impact for animals with additional donations.
This blog post by Animal Charity Evaluators outlines the importance of strategic animal advocacy research, examples of research in practice, advice on conducting research, and some research limitations.
CEA is fundraising to fill an expected funding gap of $3.6m in 2024.
In a significant stride for animal rights, the Belgian Senate has voted for the inclusion of animal welfare in the nation's constitution. This follows extensive advocacy by GAIA, a local animal welfare group. The change dictates that the Federal State, Communities, and Regions must endeavour to protect and care for animals as sentient beings in all their actions. Final approval from the Chamber of Representatives is still pending.
Faunalytics 2024 Research Agenda includes topics covering political advocacy, youth advocacy, global advocacy, equity and inclusion, consumer behavior, and capacity building. Additional plans include expanding the Research Library, continuation of advocate support, and improvements to their Impact Center.
The organization has updated their Research Library with articles on a variety of animal advocacy topics including a look at how vegan research has evolved and investigating support in the United States for broiler chicken welfare. Additionally, Faunalytics also added two new blog posts, Are Animal Advocates Tech-Savvy? and Making Connections: A Faunalytics Researcher Roundtable to their website.
Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) recently published a post announcing their 2024 plans for their work in India. In particular, they’re broadening their research mandate to focus on identifying new classes of fish welfare interventions to pursue.
Their plans specifically include:
FWI is also proud to be renewed as a recommended charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Lastly, FWI is now fundraising again to fill their 2024 funding gap. To learn more about the pros and cons of a donation, see their updated donation page.
GiveWell recently hosted a virtual event focusing on maternal and reproductive health, a new and growing area of GiveWell’s grantmaking. Emily Oster, moderated a panel with Svetha Janumpalli and GiveWell’s Erin Crossett. During the hour (recording here), they discussed GiveWell’s research and grants to maternal and newborn health.
GiveWell’s 2023 giving recommendations: GiveWell is excited to announce its 2023 recommendations to donors. For donors who want to support the programs that GiveWell is most confident in, they recommend the Top Charities Fund, which is allocated among their four top charities. For donors with a higher degree of trust in GiveWell and willingness to take on more risk, their top recommendation is the All Grants Fund, which goes to a wider range of opportunities and may have a higher impact per dollar. They estimate that donations to the programs they recommend can save a life for roughly $5,000 on average, or have a similarly strong impact by increasing incomes or preventing suffering.
ICYMI: The How To Money podcast recently interviewed Elie to discuss Effective Altruism, GiveWell’s founding, and making the most impact with your giving.
GWWC released their latest charity and fund recommendations, shaped by their evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers.
If you think GWWC is providing a valuable service, your donations can be matched when you support their operational funding at GWWC (read about their ops funding match).
GWWC’s Donor Lottery is open until January 10th.
They are recruiting for governance and advisory board members.
GWWC and Charity Entrepreneurship are looking for potential founders of new effective giving initiatives to apply by Jan 15 for a new incubation program.
Giving Green and ACE recently renewed their recommendation of GFI. Check out what Giving Green, ACE, and other evaluators had to say about GFI in their new blog post here.
The Humane League (THL) has published their room for funding and how your donations this year will help support their mission—to end the abuse of animals raised for food—in 2024. Read more about THL’s room for funding here.
Rethink Priorities recently published research previously conducted by its Global Health and Development team on road safety and GiveWell’s discount rate. The organization also posted a summary of the results of their second annual gathering of animal welfare advocates.
RP’s annual report reviews their work in 2023 and outlines their strategy and funding gaps for 2024. Please see the executive summary, the deep dive, or this previous retrospective for more information on the organization’s work and impact. Below are some highlights from the report.
Sentience Institute’s 2022 End of Year Summary was published just five days before the launch of ChatGPT. This event surprised many in the field, and the global spotlight has illustrated how important it is to understand human-AI interaction. SI’s priority continues to be researching the rise of digital minds: AIs that have or are perceived as having mental faculties, such as reasoning, agency, experience, and sentience.
The highlight from their 2023 research is the Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey with the same questions as in 2021, so public opinion from before and after recent events can be compared, as well as an additional AIMS 2023 Supplement on Public Opinion in AI Safety. A key finding was that Americans express significantly more moral concern for AI in 2023 than in 2021 before ChatGPT.
Their new end-of-year summary blog post details their accomplishments in 2023 to date.
