Project summary

The Long-Term Future Fund is primarily focused on reducing catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence and biotechnology, as well as building and equipping a community of people focused on safeguarding humanity’s future potential.

Open Phil is offering 2:1 ($2 from them for every $ from you) donation matching for the next 6 months, up to the first $3.5M from them.

More here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

We would like to fund the highest impact/$ longtermist projects that apply to us.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now

How will this funding be used?

We will spend money to fund projects that we believe are high-impact, in a sense we aren't very different from Manifund.

You can look at our "What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like?" post to get a sense of what are likely projects for us to fund given additional donations, most likely marginal donations would translate to grants in the 5M tier.

The total funding target we're aiming for in the next 6 months is $6.2M ($3.5M from OP matching and $2.7M from other donors, including ~1M that is not matched). Note that we expect to get a substantial fraction of our non-OP donations from places other than Manifund.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

Our current permanent fund managers are Asya Bergal, Oli Habryka, Caleb Parikh, and myself (Linch Zhang). We also have guest fund managers: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now#Our_Fund_Managers

As for track record, we've been doing grantmaking for a while. You can see our payout report (where we explain a subset of our grants in detail):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zZ2vq7YEckpunrQS4/long-term-future-fund-april-2023-grant-recommendations

You can also see all of our non-anonymous grants in our database here: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants?fund=Long-Term%2520Future%2520Fund&sort=round (roughly 10% of our grants last year by both number and dollars are anonymous; while occasionally this is due to infohazard reasons, the most common reason is personal privacy).

I believe we've given out fairly good grants before, eg to early iterations of SERI MATS, the AXRP podcast, networking events for digital sentience, and Joseph Bloom's initial alignment research. Also Manifold Markets. :)

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

• Funding constraints: It may turn out that not enough donors are sufficiently excited about LTFF's vision such that it makes sense to continue on as-is as an organization. If this happens, we'll likely spin down to a leaner and more manageable subset of the existing fund.

• Inability to find a fund chair to replace Asya Bergal: Asya is planning to leave in October to reduce the overlap between Open Phil and LTFF. If we do not find a good replacement for her, LTFF will be relatively directionless and would find it difficult to pivot towards higher impact directions

  • That said, our existing process is reasonably well-ironed out, and I expect that we'll still receive some great applications, our grantmakers can continue to display reasonable judgment and make good grants, etc.

• Greater competition in the ecosystem: Maybe another group or groups (Manifund?) takes over our niche in the longtermist funding ecosystem, and do a better job than we do. Note that we consider this a success for the world, even if it's a "failure" for the project.

• Mediocrity, operational and other forms of inadequacy. Maybe we'll continue to have a "good enough" project that chugs along and gives great grants, but we fail to live up to our potential by not taking higher-impact actions like actively soliciting even more great grants, building up relationships with new donors, trying to substantially improve the donor and grantee experience, etc. Most worryingly, having a mediocre product that's "good enough" might stifle or otherwise choke off competition.

You can also see the "potential negatives" list here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now#Potential_negatives_to_be_aware_of

What other funding are you or your project getting?

Open Phil is offering 2:1 matching for us, up to $3.5M from them. We've received some generous donations from individuals since our fundraising post about a week and a half ago. We've also received promises of further donations by some large donors recently.

We will try our best to alert the community if and when our full matching target is met, however there may be some lag so overshooting is possible. We would still like to have ~1M above the match, but this is not critical.

Special note about COIs between funders

Please note that we've given initial funding to Manifold Markets, the parent organization of Manifund. Thus, we ask the organization to be extra careful in how they discuss or promote us (eg lean on the side of not promoting us in newsletters, drawing extra attention to regranters or supporters about our project, etc). Similarly, we ask that any regranters who have ever received money from LTFF to mention their COI if they were to recommend a donation to us. We also ask regranters who have received money from us in the last 12 months, current applicants, and/or regranters who think they are likely to apply to funding from us in the next 12 months to refrain from donating to us.