Program Associate at Open Philanthropy and chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I spend half my time on AI and half my time on EA community-building. Any views I express on the forum are my own, not the views of my employer.
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Confusingly, the report called "May 2021" was for grants we made through March and early April of 2021, so this report includes most of April, May, June, and July.
I think we're going to standardize now so that reports refer to the months they cover, rather than the month they're released.
I like this idea; I'll think about it and discuss with others. I think I want grantees to be able to preserve as much privacy as they want (including not being listed in even really broad pseudo-anonymous classifications), but I'm guessing most would be happy to opt-in to something like this.
(We've done anonymous grant reports before but I think they were still more detailed than people would like.)
We got feedback from several people that they weren't applying to the funds because they didn't want to have a public report. There are lots of reasons that I sympathize with for not wanting a public report, especially as an individual (e.g. you're worried about it affecting future job prospects, you're asking for money for mental health support and don't want that to be widely known, etc.). My vision (at least for the Long-Term Future Fund) is to become a good default funding source for individuals and new organizations, and I think that vision is compromised if some people don't want to apply for publicity reasons.
Broadly, I think the benefits to funding more people outweigh the costs to transparency.
Another potential reason for optimism is that we'll be able to use observations from early on in the training runs of systems (before models are very smart) to affect the pool of Saints / Sycophants / Schemers we end up with. I.e., we are effectively "raising" the adults we hire, so it could be that we're able to detect if 8-year-olds are likely to become Sycophants / Schemers as adults and discontinue or modify their training accordingly.
Sorry this was unclear! From the post:
There is no deadline to apply; rather, we will leave this form open indefinitely until we decide that this program isn’t worth running, or that we’ve funded enough work in this space. If that happens, we will update this post noting that we plan to close the form at least a month ahead of time.
I will bold this so it's more clear.
Changed, thanks for the suggestion!
There's no set maximum; we expect to be limited by the number of applications that seem sufficiently promising, not the cost.
Yeah, FWIW I haven't found any recent claims about insect comparisons particularly rigorous.
Nope, sorry. :) I live to disappoint.
I think the LTFF will publish a payout report for grants through ~December in the next few weeks. As you suggest, we've been delayed because the number of grants we're making has increased substantially so we're pretty limited on grantmaker capacity right now (and writing the reports takes a somewhat substantial amount of time).
I like IanDavidMoss's suggestion of having a simpler list rather than delaying (and maybe we could publish more detailed justifications later)-- I'll strongly consider doing that for the payout report after this one.