Major Donation: Long Term Future Fund Application Extended 1 Week

[habryka]

(Crossposted to the EA Forum)

The Long-Term Future EA Funds application round is extended for one more week (until Midnight (PST) Sunday 24th of February).

The LTF Fund received a major donation such that the amount of money available for granting has more than doubled, to a total of ~$1.2 million, making our available funds greater than all money that the LTF fund has ever given away historically.

This means we can consider:

• Grants of much larger ambition and scope.

• Grants with longer time-horizons (who will need funding in future years)

• Grants to larger teams

• Seed funding for new organisations

• Many more grants to smaller projects and individuals

I think this means applying this round is a particularly good idea, as well as forwarding the application to anyone else you know who might want to apply.

Apply here.

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More info on the LTF Fund can be found here, you can see our last round of grants here.

If you’re uncertain about whether we’re interested in funding a project, you can ask me in a comment, or email me and the other fund managers at [e-mail].

[habryka]

As a reminder, here are the main interests of the Fund:

We are particularly interested in small teams and individuals that are trying to get projects off the ground, or that need less money than existing grant-making institutions are likely to give out (i.e. less than ~$100k, but more than $10k). Here are a few examples of project types that we’re open to funding an individual or group for (note that this list is not exhaustive):

+ To spend a few months (perhaps during the summer) to research an open problem in AI alignment or AI strategy and produce a few blog posts or videos on their ideas

+ To spend a few months building a web app with the potential to solve an operations bottleneck at x-risk organisations

+To spend a few months up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work (e.g. microeconomics, functional programming, etc).

+ To spend a year testing an idea that has the potential to be built into an org.

This round, due to our much larger budget, I am also interested in applications above $100k in funding. Here are some more examples of things that I would be excited about (though I can’t speak for the other fund members):

• Fund a small research team to work on a particularly important question in the domain of AI Alignment (for example, research similar to AI Impacts work on Moore’s Law and AI timelines, or Wei Dai’s many works in AI Alignment and Decision Theory, or Alex Zhu’s work distilling the Iterated Amplification research agenda).

• Fund a small team to build infrastructure/​software for the x-risk research community (like Guesstimate, PredictionBook, LessWrong, Metaculus, or a better version of The Credence Game).

[Linda Linsefors]

Hi, approximately when will it be decided who gets funding this round?

[habryka]

We originally planned on the end of February, but the larger grant amount made us uncomfortable with the short time window for the grant decisions, so we decided to take more time. I think there is some chance we will have the decisions by the end of the week, but more likely by the end of next week.

(Just my estimate, and I haven’t run this by the other fund members)