Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding and are working on the following projects:
- We run LessWrong, the AI Alignment Forum, and have written a lot of the code behind the Effective Altruism Forum.
- During 2022 and early 2023 we ran the Lightcone Offices, and are now building out a campus at the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, where we've been doing repairs and renovations for the past few months.
- We've also been substantially involved in the Survival and Flourishing Fund's S-Process (having written the app that runs the process) and are now running Lightspeed Grants.
- We also pursue a wide range of other smaller projects in the space of "community infrastructure" and "community crisis management". This includes running events, investigating harm caused by community institutions and actors, supporting programs like SERI MATS, and maintaining various small pieces of software infrastructure.
If you are interested in funding us, please shoot me an email at [email protected] (or if you want to give smaller amounts, you can donate directly via PayPal here).
Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX, and I do think we work on projects that have a decent chance of reducing existential risk and generally making humanity's future go a lot better, though this kind of stuff sure is hard to tell. We are looking to raise around $3M to $6M for our operations in the next 12 months.
Edit (June 23): I've now given a lot more details on how we operate and what we work on in the comments. I would recommend checking them out if you want to more context on our work.
Are you happy to share a rough breakdown for what you plan to spend the $3-6M?
I wrote a bunch of comments over on the LessWrong side going into detail on various aspects of our plans for the future, including spending plans, so probably good to check those out (e.g. this comment).
To give a very rough high-level overview over how I expect this money to be spent:
This might be morally accurate, but perhaps you shouldn't be saying it online in case it emboldens people to sue you looking to claw back lots of money related to this case? I'm wondering if there's a group of attorneys analogous to ambulance-chasers but for the FTX scandal.
Yeah, I thought about my policy here for a few hours and talked to some of the relevant stakeholders about the tradeoffs here (like our fiscal sponsor CFAR) and made a conscious decision to talk about this specific thing.
I currently think the incentives don't really change that much, and I am willing to not pay that money back if someone is trying to do something extortive, though yeah, even the game theory of talking about this stuff feels kind of messy and makes me sad.
I appreciate Lightcone's willingness to mention its potential legal and ethical clawback exposure to prospective donors. (At the same time, I recognize there could potentially be valid reasons for other organizations not to do so in certain circumstances.)
Would you like the domain aisafety.global for this? It's one of the ones I collected on ea.domains which I'm hoping someone will make use of one day.
Possibly! I'll reach out if our plans for this ever materialize, I was mostly just trying to give an example of a thing we've considered.