Open Phil
Article
Open Phil is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between September 12, 2021 and December 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Effective altruist organization Open Phil is offering scholarships”; “Open Philanthropy Project (“Open Phil”) is a big effective altruist foundation”; “a very large charitable organization (eg Open Phil or the Future Fund)“. It most often appears alongside Paul Christiano, ACX Grants, EA.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: September 12, 2021
- Last seen: December 24, 2023
Appears In
- Open Thread 189
- Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
- Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
- In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
- Open Thread 308
Related Pages
-
- Paul Christiano (3 shared issues)
-
- ACX Grants (2 shared issues)
-
- EA (2 shared issues)
-
- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
-
- Effective Altruism Forum (2 shared issues)
-
- FTX (2 shared issues)
-
- GiveWell (2 shared issues)
-
- Kenya (2 shared issues)
-
- Metaculus (2 shared issues)
-
- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
-
- OpenPhil (2 shared issues)
-
- UK (2 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.
2: Effective altruist organization Open Phil is offering scholarships to interested-in-effective-altruism international undergrads applying to top US and UK universities. See here for more information.
Inline links: here
The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It's got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it’s very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is "informal" - but it’s 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of “transformative AI” by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100.
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.
Open Philanthropy Project originally got one seat on the OpenAI board by supporting them when they were still a nonprofit; that later went to Helen Toner. I’m not sure how Tasha McCauley got her seat. Currently the provisional board is Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, and Larry Summers. Summers says he “believe[s] in effective altruism” but doesn’t seem AI-risk-pilled. Adam D’Angelo has never explicitly identified with EA or the AI risk movement but seems to have sided with the EAs in the recent fight so I’m not sure how to count him.
See here, Open Philanthropy is first-listed funder. Leader Kevin Esvelt has spoken at EA Global conferences and on 80,000 Hours
Open Philanthropy’s Wikipedia page says it was “the first institutional funder for the YIMBY movement”. The Inside Philanthropy website says that “on the national level, Open Philanthropy is one of the few major grantmakers that has offered the YIMBY movement full-throated support.” Open Phil started giving money to YIMBY causes in 2015, and has donated about $5 million, a significant fraction of its total funding.
Inline links: Open Philanthropy’s Wikipedia page, says
3: If you’re one of those people who gives to charity at the very end of the year because you forgot to do it earlier, you might appreciate lists of where GiveWell employees and Open Phil employees made their personal donations this year.
Inline links: GiveWell employees, Open Phil employees