Neil Buddy Shah was the Managing Director at GiveWell for 2.5 years. GiveWell is the organization that OpenPhil grew out of between 2011 and 2014 and continued to maintain close ties with over the decade (e.g. sharing an office for ~5 more years, deferring substantially to GiveWell recommendations for somewhere in the neighborhood of $500M of Global Health grants, etc).
Paul Christiano is technically the least institutionally connected to OpenPhil. Most commenters here are quite aware of Paul’s relationship to Open Philanthropy, but to state some obvious legible things for those who are not: Paul is married to Ajeya Cotra, who leads the AI funding at OpenPhil, has been a technical advisor to OpenPhil in some capacity since 2012 (see him mentioned in the following pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and Holden Karnofsky has collaborated with / advised Paul’s organization ARC (collaboration mentioned here and shown as an advisor here).
And, as a reminder for those who’ve forgotten, Holden Karnofsky’s wife Daniela Amodei is President of Anthropic (and so Holden is the brother-in-law of Dario Amodei).
I am surprised to see the Open Philanthropy network taking all of the powerful roles here.
In case it’s not apparent:
Jason Matheny started an org with over $40M of OpenPhil funding (link to the biggest grant)
Kanika Bahl runs Evidence Action, an org that OpenPhil has donated over $100M to over the past 7 years
Neil Buddy Shah was the Managing Director at GiveWell for 2.5 years. GiveWell is the organization that OpenPhil grew out of between 2011 and 2014 and continued to maintain close ties with over the decade (e.g. sharing an office for ~5 more years, deferring substantially to GiveWell recommendations for somewhere in the neighborhood of $500M of Global Health grants, etc).
Paul Christiano is technically the least institutionally connected to OpenPhil. Most commenters here are quite aware of Paul’s relationship to Open Philanthropy, but to state some obvious legible things for those who are not: Paul is married to Ajeya Cotra, who leads the AI funding at OpenPhil, has been a technical advisor to OpenPhil in some capacity since 2012 (see him mentioned in the following pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and Holden Karnofsky has collaborated with / advised Paul’s organization ARC (collaboration mentioned here and shown as an advisor here).
Zach Robinson worked at OpenPhil for 3 years, over half of which was spent as Chief of Staff.
And, as a reminder for those who’ve forgotten, Holden Karnofsky’s wife Daniela Amodei is President of Anthropic (and so Holden is the brother-in-law of Dario Amodei).