I just found out that one Manifund grantee met their serious longtime girlfriend of 2y through this dating show! Huge shoutout to @42irrationalist for organizing, and the various impact investors and retro funders for helping make this happen.

I first found out about the New Critic when on their article "p(doom)", which I found to be a good dive into the prediction markets scene, and extremely well written. I invited one of their journalists to come to Manifest, resulting in their article "Manifest Man".

Rufus then reached out asking about a larger grant to continue sponsoring longform pieces similar to those. I've learned much from longform; find quality longform writing on topics I care about to be rare; and believe that longform is extremely underprovided as a public good.

(fwiw, some other initiatives that Manifund has supported in this vein include both Inkhaven cohorts, the Asterisk blogging fellowship, and the Blog Revival Project.)

After some back and forth, and a call with the whole New Critic editorial team, I've decided to recommend a $20k grant, split into two chunks: $10k unrestricted for operations, and $10k to fund 3 longform pieces on topics of interest to Manifund (as Rufus outlines above). I'm excited to both support this team in their ambitions, and see whether this commission model can produce essays that we find to be exemplary.

Hey! I think your background is interesting and your work demonstrates a good level of commitment. I'm not personally very interested in TON (or crypto, overall), though I do find the concept of "agents with money, safely" worth developing further, and it's plausible that crypto is a good testing ground for this. I'm making a very tiny grant offer as a show of support, more in support of you individually than this specific project idea.

Making a small donation as a sign of support; I continue to be excited for games as a method of imparting interesting lessons (eg universal paperclips, maybe Manifold). Pip also has a good track record of supporting work in the xrisk space, through Ashgro and now https://beacongcr.org/

I wasn't actually able to demo the game myself -- I'm on Mac, Sequoia 15.5, and "right click => open" only gave me "cancel" and "move to trash" as options. (Vaguely I think that I've solved this problem before for other apps, but it was enough of a roadblock for me to give up). I'd encourage Pip to see if Godot or Claude can port at least a demo, to be directly playable on web/mobile.

I'd also worry that the game currently looks a little bit too AI-generated and/or chaotic, per the screenshots. I'm generally a fan of AI assistance, but specifically the gaming community has a strong immune reaction against AI content, and also in this case I'd worry there's just too much slop all around. Possibly pairing with a good visual/graphic designer might be quite helpful, since games especially seem to have high standards/stakes for visual appeal to be successful.

Excited for this - deals with AIs are an interesting space, a field that I'm quite interested in nurturing. Thanks to grantmaking.ai and Gavin for funding this!

Approving in my capacity as Manifund admin.

(I'd note that I'm skeptical of several pieces of Rohan's proposal, but for a program like Leo's microgrants, our usual process is to defer the grant recommender's expertise, while Manifund screens for compliance with our charitable mission.)

Funding and approving this project! As a practicing Catholic and also someone who cares a lot about the trajectory of AI, I'm very excited to support this event.

Jessica has pulled together a fantastic cohort of people, many of whom I've long followed and have taught me much about the world. She's also generously volunteering her own time to make this happen. I'm quite sad that I'll be out of town for it -- but excited for the videography to come!

@jesse_hoogland oh this is awesome, thank you for sharing this writeup!

(Do you know if Jueyan did end up funding this? Also curious, did you first discover on Manifund or someplace else?)

I think this is a good list of initial interviewees, and I think Steve Hsu's involvement is a strong signal for the success of this documentary. These folks screened their trailer at Manifest & held a q&a (which I sadly missed).

One worry I'd have is that a talking heads documentary like this (or the SB 1047 documentary) may have limited widespread appeal, esp compared to something produced like AI in Context's AI 2027 video. I'd also worry that something like the Apocaloptimist (which I haven't yet seen) might have covered many of these same notes. But I think it's worth having many shots on goal, and overall am looking forward to this.

@Ahmed briefly, I think this is going in an interesting direction, but I'm not as interested in a fancy world map thing; like Ronak says, a version that's just a plain table or db (and maybe with a straightforward API or sth) would be useful to answer questions I have, which are often of the shape "who might I reach out to hire for a role at Mox" or "who should I invite to speak at this conference".

I think being quite comprehensive is important -- like, knowing that all the relevant orgs and people are included would be quite helpful. Right now there's only 1k people on there and basically no people who I would think are relevant (eg the Manifund regrantors).

https://www.longtermwiki.com/ is a thing to look at for inspiration, perhaps.

Admin note, I've reopened this project with a lower minimum funding bar. I believe @MarcusAbramovitch is quite excited for at least one grant to make very soon!

Admin note: per @Euan's request, I've re-opened this project, extending the close date and restoring the previous donation offers to the project.

I have never been to Vibecamp, but many of my friends make it an annual pilgrimage. I recently officiated a wedding where the couple met at Vibecamp; the organizers tell me something like 5 married couples have met there, a number I only hope Manifest may someday hit. Also, Brooke has been super helpful in the past (eg by serving as community point of contact for a past Manifest) and is generally an awesome person. I am very excited to support Vibecamp out of my budget for fuzzies!

Happy to approve this; this kind of small fast technical grant falls in the sweet spot for AI safety regranting :)

I love the design of this site!

every donation platform should look like partiful

is a fantastic slogan, will consider it ;)

I'm also making a small personal donation as a sign of support. Marcus has repeatedly impressed me with his hard work, dedication and sacrifice towards doing good. And also with his prescience as a forecaster and investor!

Cause-prio-wise, I'm more into AI safety than animal welfare, but I think some hedging is appropriate, along moral parliament grounds. I'm also excited for AI welfare and rights, and expect some commonalities between that field and the Falcon Fund.

@acmc awesome to see that you've already launched; it's a nice-looking website!

Feedback, I pasted in a snippet and it was extremely slow (>3min), only to hit some kind of error. Imo, getting it to work relatively fast is quite important, both for a demo and for real-world usage.

@acmc you're welcome! I'm viewing this as a very cheap bet on someone outside of the standard EA/AI safety network, but otherwise with reasonable credentials, working in a problem area I think is interesting and important. For Manifund specifically, we're seeing a lot of AI generated project proposals, which is not disqualifying but can be a negative signal, and I'd love better, explainable detectors.

For fun, I put your app through Pangram, which flags your proposal as about half AI, haha: https://www.pangram.com/history/07a7f2de-1e42-4bd8-906c-8699f86061e6

Approving this project! I'm glad that @joel_bkr and others at METR are so excited for Sean's work, and from my perspective, this kind of active, expert-led, fast grantmaking is where the regranting mechanism shines.

I also appreciate Joel taking the time to lay out his considerations in making this grant, which are hopefully helpful for Sean and others in similar positions. (And @seanpetersau, insofar as you would be open to accepting more funding through this Manifund project, let me know; we're very happy to increase the funding goal on your behalf!)

@aashkapatel thanks for flagging, should be fixed now!

Approving this project! @RyanKidd I appreciate the particularly in-depth writeup, and also the fact that you referred this grant to @JueYan to get it funded; I'd love for more regrantors (and regular individuals) to be taking such prosocial actions in the AIS community.

I also personally think multi-agent dynamics are very interesting and would be excited to better understand that field; especially from more of an experimental/practical lens (like AI Village or Moltbook, rather than theory).

Approving this grant -- I've been a fan of Ink & Switch's UX work, and it's great to see them pitch in on AI safety too!

As a note, we've agreed with Jueyan to structure this as a loan rather than a nondilutive grant, to be repaid 1x (no interest) in 24 months, or 2x in case of an acquisition. I continue to be excited for Manifund to sponsor loans and equity investments, in cases where grantees are for-profits and the size of the grant is relatively large.

@Finn-Metz thanks, it's been great having you, Esben, and other Seldon folks and batchmates at Mox. Glad we were able to fill this role for you!

@AlexGajewski thanks! I loved the Cafe Calculate series you ran while at Mox, which likewise brought in a stream of interesting people. I expect your new office is treating you well, but we'll always be proud to have hosted Nonsense Factory Pantograph's earliest days!

@joel_bkr thank you so much!

(1) I'm very grateful for all the events you host! Especially for the live band karaoke, which brings such an energy and joy to the space. (And for completeness' sake, Joel also threw his birthday party last year at Mox, because his hundreds of friends would not fit in our house.)

(2) agreed on all counts!

• The AI safety community should invest more in SF, where the AI labs/startups/funders are. This was the original thesis behind starting Mox, and it seems just as true now as a year ago.

• I too wish Constellation would move to SF, and expect they would be the default safety nexus if they did move. We love our competitors! Unfortunately, from convos with Constellation people, no such move seems likely to happen soon (eg within the next 6mo), if ever.

• I do feel like we're falling short on some obvious good things from having a hub in SF, AIS happy hours being one such example. Some of this is because, at our current level of funding, we spend a lot of our time chasing random opportunities to pay our bills (eg leasing offices to tech startups). Some is from a lack of personnel; I would love to hire someone who deeply knows the SF scene around the AI labs & safety, but I don't have any such candidate lined up (please lmk if you have someone in mind). Some are just unforced errors, and we'll aim to do better in 2026!

Approving this project! (And per Jessica's request, I've lowered the minimum funding bar from $50k to $5k.)

@Corn Thanks Cornelis! And conversely I'm grateful at how you bring ideas like Taco Tuesday back and share them with your Canada friends. Bring them to Mox sometime!

(also: what are the other 2??)

@ollive Thanks Carolina! Really appreciate your recent volunteering with Mox, decorating offices and events, and just the spirit of exuberance you embody every single time I run into you

@mk_lao thanks for saying so and thanks for your donation -- we hope to have you back as well!

Approving this project, and making a donation to get this to its minimum funding bar!

Primarily, I'm donating based on Connacher's track record in the EA/AIS ecosystem. I also generally like demos/studies of multiagent interactions, as I think a lot of the future will be largely governed by such things, but most of our own experience is with chatbots or at most single agents.

I do wish there was a nice web UI for viewing (and playing??) the games, and also think that it'd be awesome to get a more complex but well-known game like Mafia or Secret Hitler implemented. (Though, take these ideas with a huge grain of salt; they arise from my bias as a consumer-product-person, and I trust Connacher has a good sense of what features actually matter)

I'm making a quick donation based on a good reference from @MarcusAbramovitch; he named it as one of the only projects that exists in the AI x Animals space, which I think makes this fairly neglected. I think the CaML's specific theory of change here is plausible, but I'm neither an expert in animal welfare nor AI benchmarks and am mostly deferring to Marcus here.

@jessicapwang Hey Jessica, thanks for flagging and apologies for the issue -- this should now be fixed. Please let me know (here, or via austin@manifund.org) if this is still causing problems!

@codercorgi Thanks, Alex! We very much appreciate the support and the kind words ❤️

Making a personal donation in support of this initiative. While I haven't spoken with Jessica, her track record seems solid, and I'm familiar with a couple of the folks who will be involved. Moreover, I'm impressed with the breadth of people who have come to express support on this project, which also provides some evidence that Jessica and SAIGE will do well at fieldbuilding. Best of luck!

@Haakon-Huynh Great, approved!

Hey, can you share what individuals or orgs are on this team (eg by updating your profile & project description)? We generally ask Manifund grantees to be identified in public, unless there are especially compelling reasons for pseudonymity.

Hey @Piotr, thanks for flagging. I generally encourage you to downvote projects which seem like cases of psychosis, as that will reduce their visibility in Manifund's homepage. Unfortunately, we're now getting enough cases of psychosis or other LLM spam submissions that we typically don't otherwise address each one; I encourage folks who might be in this situation to read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2pkNCvBtK6G6FKoNn/so-you-think-you-ve-awoken-chatgpt

Approving this project as part of ACX Grants, and making a small donation in support as well! I haven't donated a kidney (and am on the fence about whether I will someday), but am very inspired by those who have. And I do remember, back from my college days, struggling to gain weight so that I could qualify for double red blood cell donations -- so the core idea here resonates personally.

The cost-effectiveness figures presented are also compelling (though I haven't independently verified them), and I'm broadly impressed with Daniela's track record with other projects as well. Best of luck to Project Donor!

Approving this project; we've been happy to host the first cohort of Seldon at Mox, and I'm excited for more incubation and support in the space of AI safety startups. Finn and Esben are doing good work and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

Approving this project. This kind of biotech platform is a bit outside of Manifund's usual beat, but I'm encouraged by Aaron's donation to make this happen (I trust his expertise on this kind of scientific endeavor) and also Justin's past experience at Colossal, the company that de-extincted the direwolf.

Approving this small travel grant!

Approving this project, and making a small donation myself -- I've seen Theia's work before and was excited to see this pop up on Manifund. Thanks @joel_bkr and Charles for making this happen!

@Charlie as you guessed, in general Manifund is happy to extend trust to our grantees, to spend the funds by their best judgement -- so long as it's in keeping with our charitable purpose as a 501c3 nonprofit. Feel free to ask about specifics if you're ever uncertain, but we expect that we'll be happy with whichever project you choose to pursue.

Approving this project! I've been a supporter of Michael's past work (especially the SB1047 documentary) and hope that he continues to produce good videos for AI safety.

Approving this project and making a small donation of my own! Here's an excerpt from my review as an ACX Grants evaluator:

"I like this guy. I might be biased because he’s building on top of Manifold, but his product sense is pretty good. I’m not sure if making his current dashboards/systems better is the thing I would advise him to focus on, though. I feel like I’d really want him to work together with somebody else who has a strong concept but weaker marketing skills. (Maybe, with Nuno/Rai on Sentinel…?)"

Approving this project. Equistamp has been doing work with the most prominent AI safety research orgs, has been operating profitably by providing their consulting services. After speaking with Chris and Jueyan, we're happy to help them solve their operating cash constraints.

I'm also broadly excited by this model of supporting aligned for-profit work. As Chris mentions, we're structuring this grant as a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) investment with an $8m cap into Equistamp; proceeds (if any) will be returned to AISTOF's balance, allowing them to make further grants.

Approving this project as part of our portfolio for AI safety research. I've heard good things about Inspect, and it's great to see that many different regrantors are likewise excited to continue funding this open source work!

Approving this project as part of our portfolio of AI safety research. Thanks to @Thane-Ruthenis for a well-written proposal, and to @CDBiddulph for providing initial funding and your rationale!

Approving this project as part of our portfolio of fieldbuilding for AI safety. Thanks to Richard for funding this!

Approving this project, under our portfolio of advocacy for AI safety. Curious to hear any more context @RyanKidd might have to add!

Approving this small travel grant!

Approving this small travel grant!

@casebash Epoch & Mechanize ultimately decided to place their offices elsewhere, but we would have been happy to work with them, and we're happy to have Tamay as a regrantor in our 2025 cohort. There's a can of worms to unpack here, but in brief I/Mox are not very doom-y, and believe that there are many different ways to do good for the world.

(I'll also be posting an update on what Mox has been up to, soon!)

@hijohnnylin thanks for the updates; it's been great to see Neuronpedia grow over these last couple years. For myself, I view this grant as one of my most prescient grants I've made, and I'm excited to see where y'all go from here!

Approving this under our portfolio of policy research for AI safety; I think better models and plans for post AGI labor seem good.

I'll note that I'm personally a bit skeptical of theories of change that route through "publish a paper", vs something like "get a substack article in front of smart people" or what Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson are trying with the Abundance book. But I can imagine that work on different areas of the research pipeline is important, and in any case Manifund's happy to facilitate this kind of donation!

@Veterinarians-For-Animal-Welfare Hi Sadiq, please don't self-promote your projects on other people's unrelated Manifund projects, in this way.

Approving this grant to help Sam get his funds sooner. I expect Marcus may have more takes about why he's excited for this; I'm also a fan of some of the writings on https://www.samstack.io/ !

quick notes:

• I love that Michael is willing to be so transparent and responsive here. The quality of comments here are great; thanks everyone for weighing in!

• I think highly of all of Marcus, Jesse, and Michael -- and even so, I think it's reasonable for them (and others) to have strongly different takes on whether a particular project is worth funding/doing.

  • I think sometimes EA people fall into a trap of thinking there's one "right answer" about cost effectiveness or theory of change, and we need to argue it out to get to ground truth -- and while there's some value in this, there's also a lot of value in enabling lots of experiments to be executed by the people who are most excited by those. Manifund is built around the latter philosophy: "let a hundred projects bloom"!

• As for myself, I funded this for a small amount, to signal support for Michael based on his past track record. I think the SB1047 documentary was well done (though, I was also a funder of that, so might be biased). I think the viewership numbers here are impressive, though I'm not super calibrated on what passes for amazing media presence.

  • Contrary to Marcus, I suspect EA ought to pay people a lot more, though there's a lot of nuance ofc. I'm also very sympathetic to viewing funding this as "retro funding for the SB1047 documentary".

  • My biggest question is whether short clips of existing content are providing value to the world; how much do you get to shape the narrative if you're curating vs creating? It's not a model I'm familiar with, anyways but I do think it's on the rise.

Approving this grant under our portfolio of AI safety fieldbuilding; thanks to Ryan Kidd for funding it!

@sheikheddy Thank you for this comment, I've just made a small donation in support as well.

@michaeltrazzi I really appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth retrospective! And I'm sorry if the presentation at The Curve slowed down the time to present this; I hope you still found value in presenting it there~

@Tebycimtime yes, sorry for the confusion in our interface -- the number $202 indicates your total donated at this point in time, summing up the $100 and $102 donations. You can also check out your profile for a log of transactions which display the two separate donations!

Hi Michael -- are you saying that the second $100 donation was an accident and you want to undo it? If so, I can process that for you!

Making a small initial offer in support of this project! Reasons I'm excited for this:

• Petr's past work with Dwarkesh is both a strong credential, and a credible signal that he can produce more films of this nature

• I am excited for gen AI reducing the costs of great cinematography work. My guess is that right now, this form factor is underexplored because Hollywood labor unions push against genAI

• Separately, I'm excited for alternate visualizations and ways of communicating concepts from the AI safety sphere; "essays" are a common form factor, but the general public consumes much more video content compared to the typical AI safety person

And some reasons I'm not (yet) donating more:

• Video content has been popular before on Manifund before, so I'm expecting other donors to also be particularly excited to fund this. I'm also not any kind of expert on video content.

• For now, it seems like Dwarkesh's regular recorded video podcasts are more popular than the genAI documentaries. (This is only a small update; I expect the a high rate of improvement on genAI vs regular, as it's a much newer field)

• Overall, it does seem like an expensive intervention ($2m), and this proposal is just fundraising for an initial demo

I also wanted to ask Petr about the nonprofit nature of this proposal -- should the feature film end up being widely popular and profitable, how would those profits be allocated between funders and the production team?

Approving this grant to support a promising individual's continued research and education. While Manifund generally does not prefer keeping identities private, I've corroborated with Jueyan on the details here, and consider H a promising candidate and agree that in this situation it's reasonable to keep the grantee pseudonymous.

(Just musing: in the future, one market-based way to thread this needle would be to charge a higher operational fee, eg 20% rather than our standard 5%, to price in our cost of doing pseudonymized grants)

@FlorianDietz Terribly sorry about the delay -- I've put in the wire this morning, which should arrive to your bank account in the next 3 days.

Apologies for the delay, approved now as part of our portfolio to improve animal welfare!

Approving this grant as a low-cost cheap intervention to spread high-quality writing on AI safety. Thanks to Aidar for proposing this and Neel for funding!

Approving this project. I'm excited that Manifund can help support more speculative and philosophical work that is generally neglected. I do expect that understanding decision theory better will serve us well as we move into weirder worlds; and on a brief skim, their decision theory benchmark seems promising. Thanks to Thomas and Lauren for funding this!

Excited to approve this project, and contribute a bit of funding myself! Sage is one of the few EA/AI safety orgs that can ship great software products. I've been a fan of theirs all the way since the Fatebook days; more recently, Agent Village has been showcasing AI capabilities in a fun, wholesome way. I think they have a very strong product & technical team, are still iterating to find "product-market-fit", but given their impressive pace of demos and releases I'm excited to support their work.

Approving this grant as part of our portfolio on AI safety fieldbuilding! I'm happy to see such widespread praise for Apart's work, and to see that Richard, Anton, Ryan, Soroush, and Gavin (among many others) want to fund Apart to continue with its mission.

Some reflections:

• Gavin & Anton have called out that larger funders seem not to be funding Apart. In my head, I sometimes think of Apart as part of & supporting a "shadow AI safety scene", my made-up distinction to contrast Apart and things like AISC, aisafety.world, etc from the "mainstream AI safety scene", which is more typified by OpenPhil, Constellation, MATS, and the AI labs. My sense is that the mainstream scene is top down, high-trust, densely-networked in the Bay (plus London, DC); while the shadow scene is bottoms-up, loosely confederated, remote. The mainstream scene takes a while to build up the trust to dedicate large amounts of funding to people outside of it; I suspect that's one of the key reasons for Apart's funding difficulties. Part of why I'm excited to run Manifund is to support projects outside the "mainstream" (where I/Manifold/Manifund began, and arguably still reside); I feel that Apart is in some sense kindred to Manifund, and I'm particularly glad we can be helping them here.

• I also just really like hackathons (see this), and so I'm glad that somebody else in the ecosystem is systematically pushing for more hackathons!

• My biggest uncertainty with Apart is that Esben himself is stepping back into an advisory role, to focus more on their new for-profit incubator Seldon. I'm excited for Seldon (we're hosting their first batch out of Mox!), but from an outside view, having a founder depart means that Apart now sits at a fairly critical juncture for having continued impact. As a funder, my best guess is that I'd prefer to fund Seldon over Apart (though I recognize that these cater to different audiences and funders will have different preferences.)

• My unsolicited advice is that Apart should try to expand their revenue base beyond soliciting donations, to encourage discipline, financial resilience, and incentive alignment. For example, Apart seems to do well at placing great candidates into new jobs, and a natural thing to do would be to ask employers recruiter's fees to fund Apart's continued operations. "Alumni donations" would be another angle on this, similar to how universities raise from those they've taught.

@wasabipesto brier.fyi looks fantastic, great work! This is the kind of core infrastructural work that helps inform expert forecasters, and also makes forecasting more understandable to newcomers. Visual design-wise, the diagrams look great, too! I've donated an additional $5k in recognition of the time & effort you've put into making this happen.

Also some quick feedback:

• The home page is quite wordy atm -- I'd suggest radically trimming or collapsing text from the home page, and letting the visualizations speak for themselves more. Could take inspiration from PlasticList perhaps, they put most of the explanation on other pages.

• Also, suggest shorter line lengths for readability, capping around 100 chars per line. See also these typography tips.

• I'm slightly peeved at how low Manifold currently ranks, but I'm hoping it's a kick-in-the-pants to the Manifold team to figure out why and how to make Manifold more accurate, and also signal to users which markets are less trustworthy

Approving this project! While I'm not very familiar with this field of research myself, Abram is well-regarded in the AI safety space; I've spoken with another funder I trust who was interested in supporting Abram's work.

I'm also glad that Manifund can help out here, by serving as a simple, low-cost option for fiscal sponsorship!

I've re-opened the grant application now!

@wiserhuman apologies for the delay on this; I've just put in the wire!

Approving this project and making a small donation in support. It would be great to reduce the amount of time I & others are required to sleep, so I'm very curious about how this experiment goes. I've also previously worked with Sam Harsimony way back when Manifold was first starting on charity prediction markets (it was his idea!)

Approving this project. As a sidenote, I'm very grateful for Gavin's clear writeup explaining why he wanted to fund this!

Very excited for this project. "Get people blogging about transformative AI" seems like a straightforwardly good idea. While there are already some great blogs out there (eg ACX & AI Futures Project, Zvi's, Steve Newman's), I expect there could be many more; the subject is vast, complex, with numerous niches to explore.

Asterisk also seems very well-positioned to run this. I think of Asterisk itself as one of the biggest wins in the space of EA/rat-adjacent public comms. Almost every single piece published on Asterisk impresses me with the quality of the writing and the importance of the topic, and so I'm excited for the writing that will come out of this fellowship. (I wish there could be an Asterisk-quality magazine for AI safety itself; if you think you could run this project, let me know!)

Finally, producing "writers" seems as (if not more) important than producing "writing". Even just for Manifund, we've struggled to find good writers who can write clearly & engagingly, and also understands the types of projects we fund, in the AI safety and broader EA space. I also expect many orgs have similar problems, and am excited for this fellowship to surface new talent to help with this.

I've put down $10k in support and hope others join as well; I'd love if Manifund could help Asterisk find more diverse sources of funding!

Approving and making a small ($1k) donation as well, as the priors on this kind of project seem reasonable (MATS mentee asking to continue their project), and Marius and Evan's support gives me some confidence. As Marius says, strong early results could encourage me to fund this with more!

@Connoraxiotes Just wanted to say that I very much appreciate this level of transparency and openness about your thinking & finances; I think it's super helpful for others embarking on similar projects!

Approving this proposal, and funding it to half of the total ask. I'm not personally in the target demographic (it's been a while since I've studied off course notes), I'm excited to fund this becuase:

• Michael Nielson and Lawrence Lessig are two folks I've long admired, and their support is a strong signal

• While I was not previously familiar with them, the team behind coursenotes seems quite strong, with multiple interesting projects to their name

• The design of the site itself is nice, and I appreciate the clarity of vision listed on their "why" page

Best of luck to the team!

(Aside, a minor UX nit: I think this is better as a single select rather than multiselect, rn almost no coursenotes fit the intersection of any two options)

Approving this proposal. AI Futures Project has been one of the most hyped efforts in my circles for a while now, and for good reason: it brings together some of the most accomplished individuals in the AI safety scene, working under a single banner. For this reason alone, I think the team is worth taking a bet on.

They've also already made their mark, with AI 2027. I'd gotten a sneak peek, and had actually been a bit unimpressed - I had high expectations, but imo the preview suffered from "too many cooks in the kitchen" wrt writing & site design. But by launch, AIFP had upped their game, with a polished product that's been well & widely received. It's certainly shaped how I think about the next few years of AI development. Kudos to the team for being willing to share an early v0, and then iterating to make it better over time!

I think the people working on this are super smart and probably know what they're doing, but I figured I'd throw in my unsolicited 2c:

1. It seems like the core team is already heavy on researchers, so it's unclear to me that hiring more researchers is the right strategic move, vs investing in roles that can produce great content for a wide audience. Right now their plan seems to be to partner with really great folks (eg Scott for writing, Oli for website design, Dwarkesh for podcasts), and it seems to be working so far, but I would guess that having in-house expertise on this could be super valuable, much more so than a marginal researcher.

2. Specifically with the TTX, I haven't played through one myself, but my understanding is it's currently costly to run (requiring an in-person expert facilitator). I'd be pretty excited for ways to automate that, scale it out, and get much wider distribution, eg by shipping an interactive web experience powered by LLMs, or packaging it as a commercial board game.

Anyways, AIFP is one of the most exciting efforts I'm currently tracking; I've made a small personal donation as a show of support. I expect that AIFP will be amply funded by larger parties like OpenPhil and SFF, and as Neel says, is not really in my comparative advantage; but I still think that independent donations are valuable for diversifying funding streams.

@jaiwithani Yes, that's fine!

@jaiwithani Yes, we should be able to do this for your SFF application; we've historically done this for one other Manifund grantee. Note that we would ask for 5% of the grant as a fiscal sponsorship fee. Email me at austin@manifund.org to confirm this!

Approving this grant and making a small ($5k) initial grant for support! Using AI to automate & speed up AI safety research is one of those proposals that seems like a no-brainer; I'm glad that the Coordinal team is giving it a shot.

As a caveat, I have not yet tried out their demo ( I'd encourage Coordinal to make one example output visible, so people without a demo key can still step through a tutorial!) I'm also not well positioned to evaluate the quality of the tool's research outputs, not being an AI safety researcher myself. However, Ronak (who works out of our space, Mox) seems competent and on the ball; the screenshots they've shown here look promising. I'm also glad to see that Jueyan and Ryan are supporting this initiative, too.

One note:

We plan on keeping core infrastructure fully private, and providing access to the system only to vetted alignment researchers. We're only open-sourcing the direct research outputs (papers, findings, benchmarks, generated code) rather than the automation infrastructure itself.

I understand the hesitation around open sourcing the core infra, but as a donor (or investor) I would be somewhat more excited if Coordinal was planning on open sourcing everything! I think most AI safety people worry way too much about dual use, and startups overvalue the importance of code as a moat; and on the other hand, people being able to learn from & build on top of Coordinal's work seems like it could meaningful change the trajectory of their impact.

Approving this grant as in line with our mission for funding AI safety technical research!

Apologies for the delay here; we were waiting for Ryan or others with context to weigh in on the grant rationale, which we still hope to have; but we want to unblock Francesca in the meantime.

@Greg_Colbourn oh, I just wanted to chime in here because I think "approving a grant on Manifund" can sometimes be mistaken for "Manifund or Austin directly thinks this is good", and I want to clarify our stance as a platform.

I don't have a specific scenario or mechanism I feel ready to defend at this point, with regards to "things will be great". Possibly it'd be good for me to sit down and write that out at some point? But honestly this might be less of an rational, debatable point for me and more of a vibe.

(Happy to explore this more next time you're around!)

@jacaissie thank you for the in-depth update! I enjoyed reading about the progress y'all have made~

Very grateful to say that we've received two large grants towards Mox:

• $250k from Craig, an individual donor

• $60k from the EA Infrastructure Funds (not registered here, but we intend to also register with impact certs at the same $8m premoney valuation)

With this funding, we're feeling much more comfortable about our ability to improve the 3rd and 4th floors of Mox; we're also now looking to expand the team by 1-2 folks.

We are still waiting to hear back from Open Philanthropy; and are still seeking more funding from other donors and investors as well. We think we could use up to $2m quite effectively, towards revamping and renovating our space (eg to support short and medium-term housing) and to run programs and fellowships here. It's been a great 2 months so far, I'm very excited for the upcoming work here!

Congrats @cameron! Great work, I'm impressed by the amount of press coverage (eg 1, 2, 3, 4) this has gotten; even though the AI research community has mostly stopped considering the Turing Test as a meaningful evaluation, I think a proper scientific paper that showcases this result to the public is super important!

I'm also grateful that Manifund got a shout-out here, it might be our first citation:

Approving this project as compatible with Manifund's mission of fostering education on AI risks. I've spoken with Connor and Mike in person and think they are taking a tactical and reasonable approach to making this documentary.

As with my comment on Dads Against AGI, I'd clarify that I personally hold some values dissonance with the grantees here -- for example, I mostly feel that AI labs, and their CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, are generally doing good work. But Manifund aims to be a neutral platform, where projects can express a variety of different viewpoints, and so we are happy to facilitate grants to this documentary.

Approving this grant, in line with our support of projects educating about AI risk. It seems like DAA has real traction and an experienced team behind it.

FWIW, I personally disfavor the tone that DAA uses; on a quick read, they're much more Pause-y and doom-y than I would endorse. (I'm a pretty optimistic person, and expect we'll be able to make all the AI stuff go well). However, Manifund aims to provide neutral funding services, and so we're happy to host DAA while they're pursuing their own 501c3 status. I also respect that Louis and John are spending their time & money pushing for the change they think is necessary in the world!

Approving this proposal! Expertise bridging AI safety to China is sorely needed at the moment -- I can think of a few orgs who seem to be doing good work in the space (Safe AI Forum, Chinatalk), but am excited for there to be more. Best of luck to Sarah and Jeffrey on this!

Thanks, @AntonMakiievskyi! Appreciate the support, and we hope to make Mox great for all that you described~

Approving this small grant towards translating EA concepts and utilitarian thinking to new audiences.

Approving this project -- my understanding is that Control is becoming an important new agenda, and I'm heartened to see this donation following AISTOF's initial seed funding. Curious if @RyanKidd has any more to share about what motivated him to make this grant?

Approving this grant to support independent work by Tyler John. I've chatted with Neel about the context behind this, and agree that it's reasonable to keep some details private around what Tyler is hoping to do.

I also think from an outside view, Tyler's past work at Longview means that we should be happy to fund some experimentation for him. I think it's a shame that nonprofit work typically does not pay well enough for even successful employees to take risks in their career, and hope that regranting can be one solution to this.

Finally, on the object level, I'd be excited by the prospect of a large biosecurity prize; I think prizes are still undersupplied as a means of facilitating great work. (I also wish someone would credibly try to manifest a large yearly AI safety prize -- if that is you, reach out!)

Approving this grant as a low-budget way to enable Matthew to attend this Tokyo conference and share his work.

Thanks! Grateful for both your donation, and your membership. One of the best things about Mox is just being able to bump into @saulmunn (and people like him) all the time~

@Maria thanks for asking -- if you add money to your balance, that would count as a charitable donation to Manifund (a US-based 501c3 charity). You can then spend that charity balance towards your choice of projects on our site; Manifund vets each project to make sure it is compliant with our charitable mission.

@manuelallgaier apologies, I've now deleted the other comment!

Approving this project as compatible with our charitable mission of furthering public scientific research! Tsvi has a track record within the rationalist community, and this agenda seems intriguing; I hope it goes well.

I don't know Scott at all, but looking through his website, he's previously received OpenPhil funding and won an ELK prize: external credentials that his research may be worthwhile. I also like the way he thinks, both here and on the Act I project -- it seems good to me to treat AIs with the consideration one might show a child or friend. (Indeed, one of my longer term visions for Mox includes something Act I-y, by having models be participants in the space alongside humans). For these reasons, I'm happy to support Scott with a small initial grant!

Constance is one of the most gets-things-done people in EA community building. I'm consistently impressed by her ability to bring people together & execute on ideas, and am excited to support her and her vision of an SF-based hub for animal welfare folks.

(conflict of interest notes: Constance is a friend; much of her outlined budget would be going back towards Mox, as funding for events or coworking spots)

@jlucassen Sorry to hear that and thanks for the heads up; I've now set this project to expire.

Approving this project! I'm also following @emiyazono's and @bengoldhaber's lead here and making a small donation, as I highly respect both Evan and Ben when it comes to navigating the AI safety landscape.

@Mikolaj-Kniejski thanks for the update; I've set this project so that it should expire tomorrow and return the offers to the donors.

The org that I'm most interested in an analysis would be our own (Manifund), haha. I'd also be curious about a comparison between the well-regarded orgs in the space, such as Epoch, MATS, Lightcone, and CAIS.

Approving this grant! Effisciences has a track record with AI safety field-building in France; I'm wishing them luck as they scale this up towards teaching on biorisk.

I asked Isaak to put this on Manifund as soon as I saw his proposal:

• I'm anti-sleeping-pilled: I think reducing sleep needs would be very beneficial to the world, and on a personal level have experimented with polyphasic sleep.

• Though I'm no expert in biology and have no insight on how feasible this is, I'm very impressed with the credentials of this team and their advisors.

• I strongly believe in Isaak himself, having worked with him on Future Forum and seen his trajectory since. (We asked him to serve as a Manifund regrantor in 2023.) I'd expect any project that Isaak's on to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

While it's different from the AI safety work that Manifund is mostly known for nowadays, ambitious moonshots like this are what I'm most personally interested in funding, and I'm excited to be able to support this initiative.

@GlenTaggart Appreciate the update! I'm sorry to hear about the burnout/covid/cancer, and appreciate that you posted about it rather than keeping silent; I expect issues like this affect many other independent researchers, and you speaking frankly helps others following a similar career path.

Also, in case it helps with your productivity: Manifund's starting a coworking space in SF, beginning ~Feb 1; you might enjoy working from there. LMK (austin@manifund.org) if interested!

I'm making a small donation to signal support of AI Safety Camp. It's clear that they have a product which is broadly popular, has a long track record, and comes well-endorsed. I'm in favor of supporting folks who have historically produced good work, under the principle of retroactive funding; it feels to me that the AISC folks deserve some amount of support from the community.

I do have some hesitations around donating significantly more, though:

• I don't have an inside view on how good AISC has been, nor do I know the organizers nor many past participants, so my decision here is mostly deferring to what I've read online

• I'm quite confused why other donors aren't excited to fund AISC. Last time for AISC 10, they ended up raising a fair amount ($60k), but this time it looks like there's less support. Is this because the AISCs have been dropping in quality, as Oli claims? Or just that they've been doing a less good job of "fundraising"?

• I'm specifically hesitant to fund the stop/pause agenda that Remmelt supports. For one, I don't like the polarization that the stop/pause framework introduces; and if I had to "choose a side" I might very well come down on "AGI sooner would be good"

• Linda, who I've heard good things about, won't be organizing this time around. (I'm unsure how much to read into this -- it might just be a vicious cycle where the organizers leave for lack of funding, and the funders don't fund for lack of organizers)

None of my thoughts are strongly held, and I could imagine updating to think that AISC deserves much more funding -- again, I only have very shallow takes here.

This seems cool! I'm not super likely to be able to make it given travel to Berkeley, but I like the concept and trust that Jacob & Rebecca will do a great job running it, so am happy to sponsor from my "warm fuzzies" budget (slash strategic sponsorship budget -- @Conflux would be obliged if you can plug Manifund & Manifest when you get a chance!)

@mariushobbhahn Thanks for the recommendation, this is very helpful. I've now funded the two projects to half of the initial ask ($4.5k/$9k), leaving room mostly because I don't have a strong inside-view understanding of the proposals, so would leave the rest to someone with more domain expertise.

@jlucassen Having both projects is fine! I just wanted to drop a link to your other proposal, in case somebody out there likes your work in general, but thought that this specific proposal was less exciting than the other.

(A combined lump grant to support James's general research projects is also a format we're happy to see. Splitting them up allows donors more fine-grained choice over which projects to fund -- though that's not always a good thing, as oftentimes the grantees have a better sense of where money should be spent, cf Paul Graham on "Donate Unrestricted")

Ah, right after I posted this I saw James also put up another project proposal. I have no inside view on which of these is good/better, and my grant is mostly intended to be support for whichever projects James thinks is worth spending this compute on. (If anyone with expertise in this subjects wants to weigh in, I'd appreciate that!)

I don't know much about James, nor about pass@k, but I enjoyed reading his retrospective on work at MIRI as well as the other writings on his blog. (I also appreciated that this proposal is written in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner!)

$1k-$3k seems like a very small amount to request, so I'm happy to speculate on getting this to the minimum ask. I would tentatively encourage James to ask for more funding, if there are other experiments that are in the back of his mind.

Hey @cameron, just wanted to say congrats on the launch! I'm excited to try and play this sometime.

I think restricting the time window to get real users simultaneously is an interesting design choice -- getting folks online together seems important, but it's a bit sad to have to wait to try out the game. I wonder about other viral ways of getting more users online: promote on Hacker News/LW/EA forum? launch to groups of people (eg classrooms)? "share with a friend" feature where you are facing off against the person you sent the app to?

@jsd I really appreciated this writeup! It's rare to see direct, public, measured feedback for individuals (especially containing critical elements), so I'm very grateful you took the time to do so here.

Note: I asked Elizabeth if she'd be comfortable contributing back 5% of this grant directly to Manifund as a fiscal sponsorship fee, which she agreed to; thanks!

(I'm currently thinking that the Manifund general policy should be to request 5% fiscal sponsorship fee from donors giving a total of $50k+. This reduces transaction costs for small grants, lines up with what how we've operated historically, and allows Manifund charge those who are being helped most re: 501c3 tax deduction. Of course, it's a bit awkward to impose a specific donation cliff -- I don't want to encourage folks to stop donating at $49k -- but I think it's a reasonably simple policy to work with for now.)

Approving this grant! Elizabeth has a track record of producing great, prosocial research (such as her analysis on Covid) and I'm excited to see what she works on with this larger runway.

Approving this grant! While it's not shaped like a standard EA grant, it seems low cost to try and I'm happy Benjamin is offering to fund this out of pocket.

Approving this grant! While this writeup is somewhat sparser than we'd prefer, Epoch doesn't want to be scooped on their work, which seems reasonable; they should be able to post more publicly once the benchmark is released (Leopold says "maybe spring for the pilot, more like summer for the full thing").

In any case, Epoch has done some of the best work in the field on benchmarking and visualizing AI trends; we'd be happy to support unrestricted grants to their org anyways. (And as usual, as part of our regranting model, we extend considerable deference to our AI safety regrantors).

Oh, apologies -- you will want to use the "Close project" feature so that the system stops asking for updates every 6 months.

Quick thoughts:

• I agree with Ryan that public impact analysis for AI safety orgs would be good (or at least, I would want to skim more of them); I'm very unsure if Mikolaj is well-placed to do that, since it seems like the kind of analysis that would benefit a lot from either technical AI safety expertise, grantmaking experience, and/or insider knowledge of the TAIS landscape. I'm also unsure if Mikolaj appreciates the scope of what he's trying to take on.

  • That said, I think the cost of Mikolaj trying to create one is pretty low, and generally encourage people trying to do things! I'm making a small donation to encourage this.

  • I would be more excited if somebody else with a known track record (like Nuno or Larks) was helping with this project; though on the flip side the overhead costs of collaboration are real so idk if this is actually a good idea

• I also don't know if cost-effectiveness is a particularly good metric for TAIS. Research fields don't typically use this kind of metric, where output is much trickier to measure compared to something like global health.

  • Because of this, I'd encourage Mikolaj to do some of this work in public, eg outline his thoughts on how to do a cost-effectiveness analysis and to do an example one, and post it so that people can critique the methodology -- before going off and collecting all the data for the final report.

    • Also: it's possible that much of the value of this project would just be doing the cost effectiveness analysis for one or two orgs where people have a lot of uncertainty!

@Mikolaj-Kniejski One more assessment you might want to track is Gavin Leech's shallow review of TAIS; I expect this will overlap somewhat with yours. It seems like you're aiming to produce cost-effectiveness numbers whereas Gavin is doing more of an overview, but either way it might be worth reaching out and seeing if you can look at an advance version, to deduplicate work or share results.

@NeelNanda The latter - PauseAI US has signed a specific fiscal sponsorship agreement where all donations made to them are structured as donations to our 501c3, and they pay the fiscal sponsorship fee on that.

Other grantees on Manifund do not pay any fee to our platform, as of today. Instead, we often ask large donors we work with (including the one funding your regranting budget) to pay an extra 5% to help cover Manifund operational costs; smaller donors (generally <50k in total, paying with credit card) we serve at no fee.

(I've been considering changing our structure so that all donations made through Manifund include the 5% fee, to simplify our offering/align incentives/make our costs clear; if we do this we'd announce it and make it very clear in our UI)

Approving this grant! I appreciate that the grantees and Neel called out the potential conflict of interest; Manifund is generally happy to have regrantors fund researchers who they know or have mentored, so long as the regrantor does not gain significant private benefits through this grant.

Manifund has now received @cfalls's $10k donation for your project and added it to this page!

I encouraged Tom to apply on Manifund after first seeing this proposal on Nonlinear Network. As I've previously written:

I don't know Tom, but a couple weeks ago I spoke with Lucie on the importance and neglectedness of AI governance in France. I hadn't realized that the next version of the AI Safety Summit was going to happen in France; this seems like a great reason to invest in the folks doing on-the-ground work there. In that conversation, Lucie made a strong endorsement of Tom's prior work; here I'm delegating my trust to Lucie.

This still holds true, in that my donation is not significantly informed by an inside view on Tom's work, but this seems reasonable to me for a cheap and time-sensitive travel grant.

@acdc0c63-8bd5-41b1-b4cb-19e5cb8da433 For what it's worth, I expect that Elizabeth (and Timothy) would also appreciate constructive feedback about what disappointed you, rather than finding it butterfly-crushing. They're planning on releasing more episodes, so if you can describe what you were hoping to hear, they might be able to correct and adjust for it!

Approving this grant; as I wrote on the EA Forum:

This looks awesome! $1k struck me as a pretty modest prize pool given the importance of the questions; I'd love to donate $1k towards increasing this prize, if you all would accept it (or possibly more, if you think it would be useful.)

I'd suggest structuring this as 5 more $200 prizes (or 10 $100 honorable mentions) rather than doubling the existing prizes to $400 -- but really it's up to you, I'd trust your allocations here.

Special thanks to Saul for setting up this page on Metaculus's behalf!

Approving this grant! As a note, Manifund is currently fiscally sponsoring PauseAI US, helping them receive tax-deductible donations while they are still applying for their own 501c3 status. In exchange, we ask for a 5% fiscal sponsorship fee, which also applies to donations made through this page.

Approving this grant as part of our portfolio for AI safety education & outreach. The University of Warsaw had not previously been on my radar as a source of such talent, so I'm glad that Piotr is aiming to establish a presence there (and that Jay is excited to fund this!)

Approving this project! As I wrote for the Manifund blog:

Gavin Leech is a forecaster, researcher and founder of Arb; he’s proposing to re-rerun a 2023 survey of AI Safety. The landscape shifts pretty quickly, so I’d love to see what’s changed since last year.

I'm especially glad to see that others including Ryan, Anton, and Matt of OpenPhil are also excited to fund this.

(I've also updated the funding limit to indicate that Gavin's funding needs have been met)

Approving this project! As I wrote for the Manifund blog:

Elizabeth & Timothy’s initial podcast was very well received, drawing extensive, thoughtful comments from a variety of folks. I’d be excited to see them continue this series, especially if they bring in folks involved with steering the EA community (like Sarah Cheng, who has extensively engaged with their points)

@acdc0c63-8bd5-41b1-b4cb-19e5cb8da433 thanks for following up; I would very much appreciate if you expanded on what you didn't like!

@Meme-trader hi, thanks for informing us about the $ACT token. We're not experts on crypto, especially not on smaller tokens ("memecoins") and the culture around them. My cursory understanding is that Ampdot has not done anything outside the bounds of what is typical within the crypto ecosystem, and I don't feel that any administrative action is appropriate from Manifund at this time.

In general, Manifund is not the right forum to air your complaints about crypto token prices not moving in a direction favorable to yourself. If you have concerns around someone's actions, I suggest you report that to relevant government authorities. (Manifund, of course, appreciates reports of bad behavior and will incorporate those we deem credible into our assessments of our grantees).

I'm very excited to fund this project!

• Important subject: SB 1047 was very high profile, generating a lot of discourse on how AI policy should be set. Even though it didn't pass, capturing that knowledge and sharing it seems very impactful, to inform how we as a society approach future bills.

• Great interviewees: I'm impressed that Michael has recorded footage with so many of the main characters of SB 1047: sponsors, proponents and opponents alike. I recognize and follow many of these folks, and am looking forward to seeing them speak on camera.

• Rewarding initiative: Michael saw this opportunity and then just started making it happen, without waiting for funding or approval from grantmakers. In doing so, he's taken on some financial risk, forgoing 2 months of pay and funding expenses out-of-pocket. He's now asking for retro funding, which I am very happy to pay down; I want to encourage a norm of doing awesome, ambitious things without waiting for permission.

  • I think the salary he's asking for is very modest, especially given his opportunity costs and the uncertainties/downtime involved with temp work.

• Investing in video: EA and AI Safety have historically been very good at communicating its message through longform essays (see: 80k, LW/EA Forum), decently through podcasts, but fairly weakly through videos. Funding this is also an investment in building up our capacity to produce more high-quality video content in the future.

My main concerns:

• Interest in SB 1047 might already be fading, and will probably drop even more as things happen in AI and AI policy. (This is part of why I'm pushing Michael to get out the documentary ASAP). Video production can take a long time, and any delays will reduce the reach and impact of this documentary.

• I'm not very sure what makes a video "good". At a glance, the quality of the production and the quality of speakers seem very high; but will the video itself be interesting? Will it be informative? I'm personally not well placed to evaluate this.

• Perhaps clips/shortform videos optimized for Twitter/YT shorts/Tiktok would be a better use of this material. Eg I don't have time to watch many Dwarkesh videos, but the short clips are great. Perhaps worth doing both!

(Conflicts of interest: Rachel Shu is my housemate and has done videography for Manifest; Michael has crashed in our guest room while filming this)

At @RyanKidd's suggestion, I've reopened this project and am committing half of the ask here at $5k. Looking forward to seeing this course developed and taught to students!

At @RyanKidd's request I've reopened this project for donations, through October 15.

@RyanKidd Thanks for the explanation! I liked hearing about how you felt PIBBSS differs from MATS, especially the points on supporting higher variance, bluesky research and developing folks with the Connector skillset, as well as your meta points about their funding situation (on a quick Google, they've received $240k from OpenPhil and $186k via SFF in 2023)

I thought this was a surprisingly polished project, given that Lucas has been working on this alone. I'm not sure there's enough of a market for such a data platform given how small the forecasting community is atm, but I appreciate the care that has gone into building this.

Approving this as part of our AI safety fieldbuilding portfolio! I appreciate the in-depth project writeup, and have heard good things about PIBBSS. (And as usual, I'm generally deferring to regrantor Ryan Kidd on his thinking behind funding this project.)

Approving this project under our portfolio of AI safety research. I'm impressed by the list of advisors (and appreciate that Beth is personally choosing to fund this!). I also think the pop-up campus is pretty cool, am very in favor of more events like that. Best of luck with the research!

Admin note: An organizer at MATS reached out to me about this project proposal, noting:

• MATS doesn't recognize folks as "Winter 2022 alum/alumni" for people who didn't complete the entire program -- as ampdot originally wrote, they only participated in Phase I. MATS suggested using "trainee" instead.

• MATS doesn't recognize "2023 shadow participation" - or thinks that implies more involvement than they're comfortable with. MATS suggested using "collaborated with MATS scholars and mentors" instead.

I messaged ampdot about this, and they were happy to update their language and apologized that their original phrasing may have confused some people.

Hey @Arepo, I wanted to clarify that self-donation was explicitly permitted in this round and I would not want to characterize it as defecting in prisoner's dilemma. From the FAQ:

• Can I direct my funds to a project I work on or am involved with?

  • Yes! We ask that you mention this as a comment on the project, but otherwise it’s fine to donate to projects you are involved with.

Of course, we at Manifund very much appreciate the thoughtfulness of people like yourself who spent a lot of time evaluating projects outside of their own! But in designing this round, we also wanted to include folks without much time for such evaluation, and just wanted to quickly give to a project they were very familiar with.

Approving as part of Manifund's portfolio of AI safety advocacy! I agree with Adam that one important way funders like us can help the ecosystem is by derisking charitable entrepreneurship through such grants.

@AlexL do you think this other funder would be structurally able to donate to Manifund (as a US-based 501c3)? If the only blocker to your prior funder was the fact that this was a grant to an individual, Manifund is happy to provide a lightweight fiscal sponsorship service now, and accept the donation on your behalf (and use the funds to replenish Adam's regrantor budget) To be clear, this is completely optional -- we're happy to proceed with this grant either way -- but helping your original funder follow through with their commitment feels like a better allocation of credit for this grant (and of course, permits Adam to fund more causes he finds important)

I don't know Tom, but a couple weeks ago I spoke with Lucie on the importance and neglectedness of AI governance in France. I hadn't realized that the next version of the AI Safety Summit was going to happen in France; this seems like a great reason to invest in the folks doing on-the-ground work there. In that conversation, Lucie made a strong endorsement of Tom's prior work; here I'm delegating my trust to Lucie.

@Textural-Being thank you for the testimony and the donation!

@Rubi-Hudson Congrats on finishing and submitting, fingers crossed that your paper gets accepted! (I especially appreciate the reflections on why it took longer than planned; I think this kind of delay happens a lot and I hope that other researchers can learn from your example)

@ampdot hm, okay, I'm convinced enough to add back your project to Community Choice. I think my cursory impression didn't account for how much Act I was about people talking to each other (& AIs), rather than just people participating in a research study.

(No longer necessary, but one kind of reference/testimony that would have been helpful here would have been some quotes from Act I participants about their experiences. You may still want to gather some to illustrate the value of Act I for other donors!)

@ampdot Thanks. I can see the argument, though it's somewhat hard for me to assess as Act I is an invite-only community -- and even if you gave me access, I'm somewhat uncertain that a project scoped down to a small number of invited participants fits the criteria for Community Choice...

Do you have more links/references/testimonials about your past coordination or community-building work? If that seems like the kind of work that would be eligible for retroactive funding under Community Choice, then I'd be happy to just batch that together with this proposal. (Apologies for the demands for more legibility, which I know can be annoying/difficult for grantees; we're trying to do right by the intentions of the Community Choice donor).

Hey ampdot, I think this is quite an interesting proposal, one that speaks to my personal interests; Manifund would be happy to support donations to your work as part of our portfolio of technical AI safety research.

However, I think this particular work might not be a good fit for EA Community Choice (and thus should not be eligible for the quadratic fund match). I've removed it from the category for now; I'm open to hearing why it ought to qualify but I'd be pretty skeptical as a baseline.

(Also: given that your project is already close to your original goal of $5k and you indicated you have more room for funding, I'd encourage you to increase your funding goal eg to $10k!)

Oh, derp -- turns out I accidentally set the project close date to Sep 2023 instead of 2024 in the database.

@ampdot Hm, somehow this project got closed accidentally -- I think there might be something weird going on in the backend. Unlike the majority of projects in EA Community Choice, this one was a legacy project that I re-opened; maybe something in our codebase doesn't like how I've set this up.

I've re-opened it once more and reinstated my and Kyle's donation offers; if this bug keeps occurring I might have to ask CEEALAR folks to just create a new project. Sorry for the technical difficulties everyone!

Hey there! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match.

Hey Yoyo! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our science & tech research portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match. Best of luck with your work!

Hey Aidan! Thanks for this proposal and congrats on the traction; it seems like many folks are excited to support your work. Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match. (People are still welcome to donate their funds to Pro-Animal Future, there just won't be a matching component)

Hey Melina! Thanks for this proposal, Manifund is happy to support donations to this project as part of our animal welfare portfolio. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice, as it's not aimed at helping members in the EA community; I've removed it from consideration for the the quadratic funding match.

Per their request, I've relisted CEEALAR as a proposal to be considered as part of the EA Community Choice round, and lowered the minimum funding to be more in line with projects in this round.

Also making a token donation! I have not visited CEEALAR myself, but have been a fan of the concept since reading Scott Alexander's coverage of it way back in 2018. I like the ambition and would love for more similar endeavors to exist - indeed, I cited CEEALAR in the launch post for Community Choice as the kind of project we'd love to support. My biggest complaint is that it's just too far away for us Bay Area folks to come by and visit; to that end, if you're thinking about starting something similar but in California, apply for funding here or reach out to me at austin@manifund.org!

(I should note, Greg also personally invested in Manifold's seed round, for which we are grateful.)

The GWWC pledge was one of my first touchpoints with the EA community, so I was very pleased to see them join EA Community Choice! Taking the pledge is almost synonymous with the original conception of EA and earning-to-give, and I really like their basic product of "have a public website listing everyone who pledged"; simple and transparent.

For an org started in 2009 - an eternity ago in EA-land - they're a surprisingly live player! This is kinda vibesy, but while some other EA orgs feel pretty predictable & set in their ways, I like that GWWC is out there trying things. Recently, I appreciated their work around the EA Forum giving campaign, as well as the rebranding to the 10% pledge. Making earning-to-give cool again is an important and nontrivial task; I wish them the best~

(also, would love to do a joint Manifund/GWWC thing at some point!)

@marisavogiatzi Thanks, appreciate the updates!

Since demand for your work seems to be high (a great problem to have and it speaks well of your work!), I'd encourage you to consider charging EA orgs some portion of your market rate. Basically, use a (discounted) price to help you & EA clients decide how worthwhile working together will be. E.g. you might charge a well-funded EA org like GWWC 60% of your standard private market rate, or a new upcoming one like LIC 30%, making up the rest from funds from donors like here.

I've seen some other folks around EA start doing this -- for example, Lighthaven is happy to offer their campus https://www.lighthaven.space/ at a discount for work they believe is valuable (such as the very first Manifest - thanks!), but still charge some amount to offset their costs and make sure that the event they're hosting is producing value.

Hi Astrid! Thanks for the proposal; it definitely falls within our mission of advancing animal welfare, and I expect we'd be happy to facilitate donations to your work. However, it doesn't seem like this project is a good fit for EA Community Choice as it doesn't principally serve folks in EA, so I've removed it from that round for now.

Hi Kuku! As a new parent I am actually intrigued by the concept of a children's book for EA (I really liked Katja's https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/a-to-z-of-things and would actually just pay money to have a physical version of that). Your proposal is very light on details, though -- I'd encourage you to edit your proposal with more about your background and plans for this book.

Hey Jack! Thanks for the proposal -- I'm sympathetic to the ideas here and liked the concept of Semantic UI (though I haven't used it myself). I'm tentatively interested in funding a small amount, just on a personal level. Curious: why are you building this? Why would people use it instead of React/Svelte/other battle-tested frameworks?

Also: unfortunately, I don't think this is a great fit for EA Community Choice, unless you have some specific case for how this new framework will be used by many folks in the EA community. For now, I've removed this project from the round.

@wasabipesto Seconded -- this application is pretty interesting; I'd really love to see some names of EA orgs who have used your advice (or are on your backlog), and ideally links to some of that work!

Approving this grant as part of our AI safety policy portfolio, on recommendation from @RyanKidd! I don't personally have a strong sense of the merits of Future Matters but in situations like these Manifund defers to our regrantor's expertise.

(Ryan, could you say a few words about what you found promising about Kyle's proposal?)

@NeelNanda I likewise think Decode do great work; as I've mentioned elsewhere, both Johnny and Joseph are two of Manifund's standout grantees and I was excited to see them team up on Neuronpedia and other ventures. Excited to support this grant!

I want to note that the grant writeup here is a bit sparse -- which is okay, given that Johnny and Joseph have a proven track record and are seeking funding for a very specific task; but from a transparency & reporting standpoint I'd appreciate it if the feature dashboards/data for them were published and linked here once this task is done!

Approving this as part of our portfolio on technical AI safety research. Thanks to Neel for funding this and Alex for the writeup; I especially appreciated your emphasis on sharing credit in this team effort!

Hi Suzie, thanks for applying for funding. This project doesn't seem like a good fit for EA Community Choice as it's not aimed at benefiting the EA community, so I've removed it from the round. TBH I'm somewhat confused about what Hypermanifest is aiming to accomplish, but if others would like to donate funding to it then I'd be open to facilitating those donations.

Hi Deepali, I appreciate your enthusiasm for reducing animal usage in pharmaceuticals, but this project doesn't look like a good fit for EA Community Choice given its lack of focus on the EA community, and as such I'm removing it from the round. We are still happy to facilitate donations towards your work for its impact on animal welfare!

Per @ammonlam's request, I've upped the funding goal from $1k to $20k.

Hi Edison! I enjoyed looking through your overall portfolio, and I think the concept of Heartlog is very cute. That said, I don't think it's a good fit for the EA Community Choice round, since Heartlog's primary beneficiaries aren't members of the EA