Announcing the Q1 2025 Long-Term Future Fund grant round

By Linch, calebp, Habryka @ 2024-12-20T02:17 (+30)

The Long-Term Future Fund is pleased to invite applications to our Q1 2025 funding round. We are seeking to support individuals and organizations working to help humanity navigate existential risks or working on projects improving humanity’s long-term flourishing.

→ Click here to apply ←

Deadline for applying is February 15th. We will respond to applications submitted before then by March 31st, and should have most funding disbursed by April 30th.

Why Grant Rounds?
After a period of accepting applications on a rolling basis, we're trialling returning to focused grant rounds. I am hoping this will:

• Allow us to recalibrate our funding thresholds given a rapidly changing giving environment
• Provide donors with clearer feedback on the impact of their contributions
• Offer applicants predictable response timelines

For particularly time-sensitive opportunities, we maintain a fast-track application process, though we expect the bar to be substantially higher for funding through this channel (i.e., your odds of receiving funding are lower if you apply through the fast-track application).

What We Fund
We continue to focus on reducing existential risk (x-risk) and supporting work that could radically improve humanity's future. In practice, we expect the clear majority of projects we support to be focused on reducing x-risk from AI. Example focus areas include:

• Research and analysis on x-risk and transformative technologies, with a focus on existential risks from Artificial Intelligence
• Ecosystem support to help others work on x-risk and transformative technologies
• Field-building and improving epistemics both within the extended ecosystem of people working on the long-term future, and among important decision-makers
• Efforts to improve global governance of transformative technologies, again with a particular focus on AI

Who Can Apply?
Individuals and organizations worldwide are welcome to apply. We frequently fund:

• Novel research projects
• Independent researchers and writers
• Early-stage organizations
• Event organizers
• Promising individuals seeking career transitions into x-risk work

Timeline

• Application deadline: February 15th, 2025
• Decisions communicated: By March 31st, 2025
• Funding disbursed: April 2025

Giving Environment
The funding environment has changed considerably over the past year. Our sense is there are now many more highly-impactful potential donation targets while availability and flexibility of funding for many of those projects is substantially reduced. We aim to use this round to recalibrate our bar for funding and help focus our limited evaluator attention more effectively.

What happens to existing applications?
We aim to get back to all applications currently in our pipeline before February 1st. We will fund the most high-priority applications on an expedited basis, but expect to defer most of the promising applications presently in the pipeline to be evaluated in the grant round (and will send emails to existing applicants with instructions on how to make sure they get included in the round if they want to, and when they should expect to get a response from us).

What if I miss the application deadline?
That’s fine – we will continue to have an always-open application. If you submit your application after the deadline has passed, we’ll simply evaluate your application in the next funding round, which will likely be staggered from this round by a few months.

Questions?
We will announce an Ask Me Anything (AMA) soon, likely answering questions in the first or second week of January. In the meantime, you’re welcome to:

• Ask questions in the comments below
• DM me on EA Forum/Less Wrong
• Email me/Oli/Caleb at longtermfuture@effectivealtruismfunds.org

We will also be updating the website and application form with new details in the next few days; please bear with us if details on the website and this announcement do not exactly match. 

We look forward to reviewing your applications! And if you know someone doing valuable work in this space, please encourage them to apply.