ACX Grants 2024 | Manifund

Astral Codex Ten (ACX) is a blog written by Scott Alexander on topics like reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics, and politics. ACX Grants (ACXG) is a grants program in which Scott Alexander helps fund charitable and scientific projects — see the 2022 cohort here and his retrospective on ACXG 2022 here. In ACXG 2024, some of the applications were given direct grants and the rest were given the option to participate in an impact market. (More details below; for Scott’s original descriptions and explanations, see here.)

Direct Grants

Scott evaluated all of the applications, then directed grants to a number of proposals. The projects on the “Grants” tab and in Scott’s announcement post were given grant money directly. You can contribute additional funding to some of these projects by donating on the project’s Manifund page.

Impact Market

Projects that weren’t given a direct grant were eligible to participate in an impact market, and the ones that opted in are listed on the “Impact Market” tab.

Impact markets are an alternative to grants or donations as a way to fund ambitious and effective charitable projects. A collection of philanthropies announce that they'll be giving out prizes for the completion of successful, altruistic projects that solve important problems the philanthropies care about, and project creators strike out to build projects that solve those problems. If they need money to get started, "investors" can buy a stake in the project's possible future prize winnings. You can read more about how impact markets generally work here.

In this impact market, four philanthropic funders have expressed interest in giving prizes* to successful projects that align with their interests:

Next year’s ACX Grants (ACXG 2025) will be most interested in funding charities that pursue novel ways to change complex systems, either through technological breakthroughs, new social institutions, or targeted political change. The Long Term Future Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund focus on the long-term future, including but not limited to AI safety, forecasting, and longtermist community building. The EA Infrastructure Fund focuses on EA community-building. You can find previous lists of grants funded by ACXG, the LTFF, the EAIF, and the SFF.

Anyone can invest in projects — including you! If you’re interested in learning more about investing or donating to projects, email saul@manifund.org or book a call here.

*These “prizes” are sometimes called “retroactive funding."