2024 marked 10 years since we launched Open Philanthropy. We spent our first decade learning (about grantmaking, cause selection, and the history of philanthropy), and growing our team and expertise to be able to effectively deploy billions of dollars from Good Ventures, our main funder. Our early grants — and some grantees we’ve helped get started — are now old enough that we can see material signs of our impact in the world.
The start of our second decade also marked a major change in our direction. With Good Ventures approaching the level of spending consistent with its founders’ ambition to spend down in their lifetimes, we finally began to execute at scale on our long-held ambition to support other funders, and found a surprising degree of early success. I expect that our ambition to serve additional partners will guide much of our second decade.
A few highlights from the year:
- We launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF), a >$100 million collaborative fund to reduce lead exposure globally. LEAF marked our first major foray into partnering with other funders beyond Good Ventures, and we’re planning to do a lot more in this vein going forward — more below.
- Our longtime grantee David Baker won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work using AI for protein design. We’re proud to have supported both the basic methods development and the potentially high-impact humanitarian applications of his work for ailments like syphilis, hepatitis C, snakebite, and malaria.
- Our grantee Open New York played an important role in the recent passage of New York City’s largest zoning overhaul in over 60 years. The city planning department expects the package to create 80,000 new homes over 15 years, making this the first set of major YIMBY reforms to pass in New York City.
- Research mentorship programs that we fund continue to produce some of the top technical talent in AI safety and security. Graduates of programs like MATS, the Astra Fellowship, LASR Labs, and ERA-AI have contributed to key safety areas like interpretability, evaluations, and loss of control. For instance, MATS now trains more than 100 aspiring AI safety researchers annually, some of whom rapidly contribute to the field: a recent graduate received “Best Paper” at one of the leading AI conferences.
- Our grantee, the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund, brought attention to the unprecedented risks of creating mirror bacteria, working alongside a group of 30+ esteemed scientists (including two Nobel laureates). Their work was published in Science along with a 300-page technical report detailing the risks.
- We directed $87 million to GiveWell-recommended charities. We continue to think that these charities are among the highest-value uses of philanthropic money, and we are proud to support their work on malaria, vitamin A deficiency, childhood vaccination, and more.
For more examples of interesting work we supported, check out this blog post. The rest of this update:
- Offers brief updates on grantmaking from each of our programs.
- Reflects on a few themes from the year including:
- Appointing a new leadership team.
- Building new partnerships.
- Tracking continued rapid progress on AI.
- Looks forward to the rest of 2025.
As always, I welcome feedback. You can find me on Twitter/X or Bluesky, or email us at [email protected].
You can read the rest of this post at Open Philanthropy's website.
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This is so epic, keep up the good work!