Future Fund
Article
Future Fund is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 07, 2022 and February 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “FTX announces the launch of the Future Fund ( blog announcement , Twitter thread ), a philanthropic organization”; “Not Open Philanthropy or Future Fund or any of those people”; “crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried donated $1 billion to the Future Fund, a rationalist-adjacent organization”. It most often appears alongside FTX, Amazon, effective altruism.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: March 07, 2022
- Last seen: February 24, 2023
Appears In
- Open Thread 214
- Every Bay Area House Party
- 22
- Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
- Open Thread 243
- Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants
Related Pages
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- FTX (3 shared issues)
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Metaculus (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- 6 Committee (1 shared issues)
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- 1000 (1 shared issues)
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- 1200 (1 shared issues)
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- 1400 (1 shared issues)
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- 1650 (1 shared issues)
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- 400 AD (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
1: Crypto exchange FTX announces the launch of the Future Fund (blog announcement, Twitter thread), a philanthropic organization run by various great people who I trust. They hope to spend $100 million - $1 billion per year on cause areas that improve the long-term future, including AI alignment, biosecurity, climate, nuclear war, education, prediction markets, and many more. What this means for you:
“Not Open Philanthropy or Future Fund or any of those people, but I was able to get independent funding.”
In February, crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried donated $1 billion to the Future Fund, a rationalist-adjacent organization that kickstarts projects promoting the long-term future of humanity. When they couldn’t spend their money fast enough, they deputized friendly experts as “regrantors”, charged with the task of going out and spending their money to start organizations that should exist but don’t. One regrantor must have thought that good forecasting teams were in this category, because it looks like Future Fund spent $2 million making this happen. The result is the Swift Centre For Applied Forecasting in London. They describe themselves as:
Here we would kickstart the supply side of the market with a set of grant proposals as above, but the final oracular funder would be a very large charitable organization (eg Open Phil or the Future Fund), operating at a scale so far beyond the size of the market that they could commit to funding every project that was good enough to deserve it.
Maybe a better way to look at this is abstracting out the investor and comparing “final oracular funder donates directly to charity” vs. “final oracular funder gives money to investor, causing charity to get funded”. Here it becomes clear that it’s the oracular funder who’s losing out on the tax benefits. But do oracular funders (eg OpenPhil, Future Fund) pay taxes at all, or benefit from tax-deductability? I’m not clear on this.
Once an impact certificate marketplace is established, decisions of final oracular funders will determine whether savvy private investors get millions of dollars or not. That means that savvy private investors - who are very good at influencing things! who might have entire departments whose whole job it is to influence other large savvy organizations! - will want to gain power over organizations like Future Fund and OpenPhil and influence their grantmaking. A worst-case scenario for this might look like the current relationship between the US military and its defense contractors, where outright bribery is banned but the contractors use many other forms of soft influence to sway military decision-makers.
2: New EA contest: change the Future Fund’s opinion about AI risk, win up to $500,000. Some people have expressed concern that this pattern-matches to the kind of cranks who say things like “I will give $1 million to anyone who can prove that the Queen is not a lizard!”, but here’s my pitch for taking it seriously: Future Fund spends tens of millions of dollars on AI risk each year, they would genuinely like to know whether they should stop doing it (or do it more), and they’ve gotten independent superforecasters to be the judges. Also they’ve promised to pay out at least $50,000 each to the best three entries regardless of whether anything changes their mind or not. Keep in mind that you can win for convincing them to be less concerned, more concerned, or concerned in a different way - you can find their current positions and the full rules here. This is an interesting new kind of epistemic institution and I look forward to seeing what happens.
A: Manifold received some money from the Future Fund, an FTX-associated charity, for a related project. Some of those funds have been used for Manifold's charity program and platform development; the rest is sitting in an account pending final disposition. None of the final oracular funding for the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants round is coming from an FTX-related source.
Inline links: Manifold's charity program
A: Impact market supporters have been trying to get guidance on this for years without a clear answer. Finally last year the Future Fund was able to get some lawyers’ opinions on this issue; they said that impact markets were definitely legal as long as they were restricted to accredited investors. But I think these lawyers worked for FTX, so I don’t have complete confidence in their judgment. Our understanding is that the recognized way to solve issues like this is to start the project, try to comply with all relevant laws as best we can, and see what happens. If the government tells us to stop, we’ll stop and refund everyone all their money, up to the first $20,000 spent.