Open Philanthropy: Our Progress in 2023 and Plans for 2024

Hello again Alex,

You discuss the allocation of funds across your 2 main areas, global health and wellbeing (GHW) and global catastrophic risks (GCR), but (as before) you do not say anything about the allocation across animal and human interventions in the GHW portfolio. I assume you do not think the funding going towards animal welfare interventions should be greatly increased, but I would say you should at least be transparent about your views.

For reference, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare is 13.6 DALY/$ (= 0.01*1.37*10^3), i.e. 680 (= 13.6/0.02) times Open Philanthropy's bar. I got that multiplying:

• The cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.01 DALY/$ (50 DALY per 5 k$), which is half of Open Philanthropy's bar of 0.02 DALY/$.
• My estimate for the ratio between cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare and GiveWell's top charities of 1.37 k (= 1.71*10^3/0.682*2.73/5):
  • I calculated corporate campaigns for broiler welfare increase neaterm welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effectively as the lowest cost to save a life among GiveWell’s top charities then of 3.5 k$, respecting a cost-effectiveness of 0.286 life/k$ (= 1/(3.5*10^3)).
  • The current mean reciprocal of the cost to save a life of GiveWell’s 4 top charities is 0.195 life/k$ (= (3*1/5 + 1/5.5)*10^-3/4), i.e. 68.2 % (= 0.195/0.286) as high as the cost-effectiveness I just mentioned.
  • The ratio of 1.71 k in the 1st bullet respects campaigns for broiler welfare, but Saulius estimated ones for chicken welfare (broilers or hens) affect 2.73 (= 41/15) as many chicken-years.
  • OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.

Thanks for the update, Alex!

Could you elabotate on the influence of Cari and Dustin on your grantmaking (see what I have highlighted below), ideally by giving concrete examples?

As CEO, I [Alex] work more closely with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, our primary funders and founding board members, than I had in the past. Dustin and especially Cari were very involved at the founding of Open Philanthropy — our grant approval process in the very early days was an email to Cari. But their level of day-to-day involvement has ebbed and flowed over time. Cari, in particular, has recently had more appetite to engage, which I’m excited about because I find her to be a wise and thoughtful board president and compelling champion for Open Philanthropy and our work. Dustin has also been thinking more about philanthropy and moral uncertainty recently, as reflected in this essay he posted last month.

It’s worth noting that their higher level of engagement means that some decisions that would have been made autonomously by our staff in the recent past (but not in the early days of the organization) will now reflect input from Cari and Dustin. Fundamentally, it has always been the case that Open Philanthropy recommends grants; we’re not a foundation and do not ultimately control the distribution of Cari and Dustin’s personal resources, though of course they are deeply attentive to our advice and we all expect that to continue to be the case. All things considered, I think Cari and Dustin have both managed to be involved while also offering an appropriate — and very welcome — level of deference to staff, and I expect that to continue.

I really appreciated this report, it seemed one of the most honest and open communications to come out of Open Philanthropy, and it helped me connect with your priorities and vision. A couple of specific things I liked.

I appreciated the comment about the Wytham Abby purchase, recognising the flow on effects Open Phil decisions can have on the wider community, and even just acknowledging a mistake - something which is both difficult and uncommon in leadership.

"But I still think I personally made a mistake in not objecting to this grant back when the initial decision was made and I was co-CEO. My assessment then was that this wasn’t a major risk to Open Philanthropy institutionally, so it wasn’t my place to try to stop it. I missed how something that could be parodied as an “effective altruist castle” would become a symbol of EA hypocrisy and self-servingness, causing reputational harm to many people and organizations who had nothing to do with the decision or the building."

I also liked the admission on slow movement on lead exposure. I had wondered why I hadn't been hearing more on that front given the huge opportunities there and the potential for something like the equivalent of a disease "elimination" with a huge effect on future generations. From what I've seen, my instinct is that it had potential to perhaps be a more clear/urgent/cost-effective focus than other Open Phil areas like air quality.

All the best for this year!

From the linked report:

We think it’s good that people are asking hard questions about the AI landscape and the incentives faced by different participants in the policy discussion, including us. We’d also like to see a broader range of organizations and funders getting involved in this area, and we are actively working to help more funders engage. 

Here's a story I recently heard from someone I trust:

An AI Safety project got their grant application approved by OpenPhil, but still had more room for funding. After OpenPhil promised them a grant but before it was paid out, this same project also got a promise of funding from Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). When OpenPhil found out about this, they rolled back the amount of money the would pay to this project, buy the exact amount that this project was promised by SFF, rendering the SFF grant meaningless. 

I don't think this is ok behaviour, and definitely not what you do to get more funders involved. 

Is some context I'm missing here? Or has there been some misunderstanding? Or is this as bad as it looks?

I'm not going to name either the source or the project publicly (they can name themselves if they want to), since I don't want to get anyone else in to trouble, or risk their chances of getting OpenPhil funding. I also want to make clear that I'm writing this on my own initiativ. 

There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all, and I think this sort of things are worth calling out. 

Edit: I've partly misunderstood what happened. See comment below for clarification. My apologies. 

Thanks for writing and sharing this Alexander – I thought it was an unusually helpful and transparent post.

The decline of our available assets should disproportionately affect funding for GHW relative to GCR because we think that opportunities in our GHW portfolio vary less in terms of expected cost-effectiveness. That is, we think GHW opportunities are more closely clustered around the “bar” we use to define which grants meet our standards for cost-effectiveness.

I wonder whether the 2nd sentence above means you have cost-effectiveness estimates of your GHW grants. If so, I think it would be good if you shared them for transparency. I appreciate justifying well your estimates would take time, but I assume sharing some estimates with little context would be better than sharing no estimates. I also believe you have great researchers which could quickly provide adequate context for the estimates.

From the linked post: 

As a result of our internal process, we decided to keep that new higher bar, while also aiming to roughly double our GCR spending over the next few years — if we can find sufficiently cost-effective opportunities. 

At first glance, this seems potentially 'wildly conservative' to me, if I think of what this implies for the AI risk mitigation portion of the funding and how this intersects with (shortening) timelines [estimates]. 

My impression from looking briefly at recent grants is that probably <= 150M$ was spent by Open Philanthropy on AI risk mitigation during the past year. A doubling of AI risk spending would imply <= 300M$ / year.

AFAICT (including based on non-public conversations / information), at this point, median forecasts for something like TAI / AGI are very often < 10 years, especially from people who have thought the most about this question. And a very respectable share of those people seem to have < 5 year medians.

Given e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/dustin-a-moskovitz/, I assume, in principle, Open Philanthropy could spend > 20B$ in total. So 150M$ [/ year] is less than 1% of the total portfolio and even 300M$ [/ year] would be < 2%.

X-risk estimates from powerful AI vs. from other sources often have AI take more than half of the total x-risk (e.g. estimates from 'The Precipice' have AI take ~10% of ~17% for x-risk during the next ~100 years).

Considering all the above, the current AI risk mitigation spending plans seem to me far too conservative.

I also personally find it pretty unlikely that there aren't decent opportunities to spend > 300M$ / year (and especially > 150M$ / year), given e.g. the growth in the public discourse about AI risks; and that some plans could potentially be [very] scalable in how much funding they could take in, e.g. field-building, non-mentored independent research, or automated AI safety R&D.  

Am I missing something (obvious) here?

(P.S.: my perspective here might be influenced / biased in a few ways here, given my AI risk mitigation focus, and how that intersects / has intersected with Open Philanthropy funding and career prospects.)