The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now

The EA Infrastructure Fund also has $1.2–$4 million in room for more funding

• The EA Infrastructure Fund will grant out around $1.2 million during this funding round. Extrapolating from that number and expecting some further growth, I'd guess it'll want to spend around $3–$6 million this year.
• The fund has $1.8 million available currently, leaving a $1.2–$4.2 million funding gap. I expect that donors will by default give around $1.4 million by November, likely leaving to a funding shortfall of $0–$2.8 million (with a median guess of $1 million).
• Similar to the Long-Term Future Fund, the EA Infrastructure Fund has greatly increased its grantmaking capacity: It received 79 applications as part of the current round  (up 2x compared to last round), desk-rejected 21 of them, and decided to fund 25 (up 3x) out of the remaining 58, with a total grant volume of $1.2 million (up 3x), while (in my view) maintaining and perhaps increasing the quality of the grants.

We’ve recently changed parts of the fund’s infrastructure and composition, and it’s possible that these changes have caused us to unintentionally lower our standards for funding. My personal sense is that this isn’t the case

Can you say more about why the changes might have led lower standards for funding? It sounds like you think there are some at least somewhat plausible reasons why this might be the case.

Can you also say more about why you actually don't think the standards have fallen despite these possible reasons?

Why does Open Philanthropy not start granting out $1M/yr to the Long-Term Future Fund? Hopefully these opportunities would beat Open Phil's last dollar!

We received 129 applications this round, desk rejected 33 of them, and are evaluating the remaining 96. Looking at our preliminary evaluations, I’d guess we’ll fund 20 - 30 of these.

I keep hearing that there is "plenty of money for AI safety" and things like that. But by the reversal test, don't these numbers imply you think that most LTFF applicants could do more good earning to give? (Assuming they can make at least the hourly wage they requested on their application in the private sector.)

If they request a grant with a wage of $X/hr, and you reject their proposal, that implies you think the value of the work they are doing is less than $X (since you are unwilling to purchase it at that price), so they would be better off spending a marginal hour to earn $X for the fund instead of putting a marginal hour into direct work.

Your post talks about "room for more funding" in reference to your previous standards for funding, but I think this might be a better way to think about it--if you would be sad to see an applicant give up on direct work and switch to earning to give after LTFF rejects them, I think you still have room for more funding. (This is ~80% of applicants who are getting rejected here--what message should they take away from a rejection? I realize that "give up on direct work" is probably an incredibly demoralizing message for those 80%, I'm just not sure why the above argument is incorrect.)

I wonder whether this alters the calculus for whether to give to donor lotteries (as opposed to EA Funds)? 

Four months ago,  it seemed like donating to the donor lottery was being recommended as a kind of default (unless the donor had a particularly cool and unusual idea for where to donate). I speculated that it might be better for a lot of donors to just donate to the Funds, resulting in the money being allocated by the fund managers rather than whoever won the lottery[^1]. It seemed at the time that the response was fairly sanguine about the possibility that individual donors (e.g. lottery winners) might make better allocations than the fund managers. 

If we thought that the EA Funds are quite well-funded relative to the potential projects available to fund, we might be more inclined to think this is true (since the lottery winner can, in theory, seek out more promising opportunities). If, however, EA Funds are relatively under-funded, and can't fund many promising opportunities available to them, then it might seem better to just encourage people to donate to the funds by default (unless, perhaps, they are particularly confident that they or others could beat the fund managers with more time to reflect).

One might argue that it would be better for people to donate to the lottery even when the Funds are very underfunded, because whoever the winner is can make a judicious decision (potentially advised by the Fund managers) about whether they should just donate to the Funds or not. As I noted at the time, I'm a little worried that lottery winners might be biased against just donating their winnings back to the Fund. And, more generally, one might wonder about why the lottery winner would be expected to make a better decision about that question than the fund managers themselves. There may also be other advantages to people donating directly to the funds if they are under-funded (e.g. perhaps grants can be made more quickly via people donating directly to the funds, than via the lottery winner conducting their own investigations and possibly choosing to donate to the funds, or perhaps funding decisions can be made more reliably, if the funds have a more predictable amount of money coming in, rather than a large pool of money possibly going to them, possibly being donated to projects they would recommend and possibly being donated elsewhere), but of course I don't know about whether any of those practical details hold.

[^1]

Though to be clear I also speculated that it could be better for people to make individual donation decisions, rather than to donate to the lottery, if this lead to more investigation, experimentation and knowledge generation from a larger number of more engaged individuals.