Like many organizations, Open Philanthropy has had multiple founding moments. Depending on how you count, we will be either seven, ten, or thirteen years old this year. Regardless of when you start the clock, it’s possible that we’ve changed more in the last two years than over our full prior history. We’ve more than doubled the size of our team (to ~110), nearly doubled our annual giving (to >$750M), and added five new program areas.
As our track record and volume of giving have grown, we are seeing more of our impact in the world. Across our focus areas, our funding played a (sometimes modest) role in some of 2023’s most important developments:
- We were among the supporters of the clinical trials that led to the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recommending the R21 malaria vaccine. This is the second malaria vaccine recommended by WHO, which expects it to enable “sufficient vaccine supply to benefit all children living in areas where malaria is a public health risk.” Although the late-stage clinical trial funding was Open Philanthropy’s first involvement with R21 research, that isn’t the case for our new global health R&D program officer, Katharine Collins, who invented R21 as a grad student.
- Our early commitment to AI safety has contributed to increased awareness of the associated risks and to early steps to reduce them. The Center for AI Safety, one of our AI grantees, made headlines across the globe with its statement calling for AI extinction risk to be a “global priority alongside other societal-scale risks,” signed by many of the world’s leading AI researchers and experts. Other grantees contributed to many of the year’s other big AI policy events, including the UK’s AI Safety Summit, the US executive order on AI, and the first International Dialogue on AI Safety, which brought together scientists from the US and China to lay the foundations for future cooperation on AI risk (à la the Pugwash Conferences in support of nuclear disarmament).
- The US Supreme Court upheld California’s Proposition 12, the nation’s strongest farm animal welfare law. We were major supporters of the original initiative and helped fund its successful legal defense.
- Our grantees in the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement — which works to increase the supply of housing in order to lower prices and rents — helped drive major middle housing reforms in Washington state and California’s legislation streamlining the production of affordable and mixed-income housing. We’ve been the largest national funder of the YIMBY movement since 2015.
We’ve also encountered some notable challenges over the last couple of years. Our available assets fell by half and then recovered half their losses. The FTX Future Fund, a large funder in several of our focus areas, including pandemic prevention and AI risks, collapsed suddenly and left a sizable funding gap in those areas. And Holden Karnofsky — my friend, co-founder, and our former CEO — stepped down to work full-time on AI safety.
Throughout these changes, we’ve remained devoted to our mission of helping others as much as we can with the resources available to us. But it’s a good time to step back and reflect.
The rest of this post covers:
- Brief updates on grantmaking from each of our 12 programs.
- Our leadership changes over the past year.
- Our chaotic macro environment over the last couple of years.
- How that led us to revise our priorities, and specifically to expand our work to reduce global catastrophic risks.
- Other lessons we learned over the past year.
- Our plans for the rest of 2024.
Because it feels like we have more to share this year, this post is longer and aims to share more than I have the last two years. I’m curious to hear what you think of it — if you have feedback, you can find me on Twitter/X at @albrgr or email us at info@openphilanthropy.org.
You can read the rest of this post at Open Philanthropy's website.
I really appreciated this report, it seemed one of the most honest and open communications to come out of Open Philanthropy, and it helped me connect with your priorities and vision. A couple of specific things I liked.
I appreciated the comment about the Wytham Abby purchase, recognising the flow on effects Open Phil decisions can have on the wider community, and even just acknowledging a mistake - something which is both difficult and uncommon in leadership.
"But I still think I personally made a mistake in not objecting to this grant back when the initial decision was made and I was co-CEO. My assessment then was that this wasn’t a major risk to Open Philanthropy institutionally, so it wasn’t my place to try to stop it. I missed how something that could be parodied as an “effective altruist castle” would become a symbol of EA hypocrisy and self-servingness, causing reputational harm to many people and organizations who had nothing to do with the decision or the building."
I also liked the admission on slow movement on lead exposure. I had wondered why I hadn't been hearing more on that front given the huge opportunities there and the potential for something like the equivalent of a disease "elimination" with a huge effect on future generations. From what I've seen, my instinct is that it had potential to perhaps be a more clear/urgent/cost-effective focus than other Open Phil areas like air quality.
All the best for this year!