The Grant Decision Boundary: Recent Cases from the Long-Term Future Fund

By Linch, calebp @ 2024-11-29T01:50 (+66)

Below is a fictionalized list of grants the Long-term Future Fund (LTFF) narrowly rejected or accepted in the last 6 months. We aim to broadly convey which grants we barely rejected, while anonymizing any individual one. It follows our previous two posts on marginal grantmaking, from August and November of 2023. We hope this is useful to potential donors and other community members.

As the grants we’ve fictionalized are grants LTFF narrowly accepted or rejected, additional funding to LTFF will allow us to roughly pay for projects of similar or slightly lower quality and approximate cost-effectiveness. If that appeals to you, please consider donating here (alt : every.org).

Grants

6-month stipend to continue AI safety independent research through temporal understanding and deception detection ($60,000)

This 6-month project investigates situational awareness in language models through temporal understanding, aiming to develop realistic scenarios for deceptive alignment by exploring future-past representations, training distribution-shift-based backdoors, and evaluating targeted safety interventions. The investigator has published research on multimodal robustness benchmarking, automated debiasing, and temporal convolutional networks in major ML venues, while demonstrating organizational leadership by scaling a technical volunteering program from 20 to 150+ practitioners serving 35 partner organizations.

10-month stipend for advancing biosecurity through DNA synthesis screening standards ($105,000)

This 10-month project strengthens biosecurity safeguards by developing technical security standards for emerging DNA synthesis platforms, creating nucleic acid screening policies, and building consensus among industry stakeholders through national and international standards bodies. The investigator has published multiple papers on biosecurity governance and DNA screening in venues like AAAI^[1] and Global Biosecurity, directly advised major DNA synthesis companies and government agencies on security implementations, and achieved concrete policy outcomes including proposed screening guidelines adopted by international consortiums and security recommendations implemented by commercial manufacturers.

Stipend for international law expert to finish a book advancing AI governance frameworks ($25,000)

This 4-month project develops foundational frameworks for international AI governance through writing a book on catastrophic risk law, contributing handbook chapters on AI treaties, and drafting model governance structures, while directly advising key international bodies on AI policy. The investigator has authored influential policy papers on institutional models for AI governance, contributed to major international principles on intergenerational equity, shaped executive-level AI policy directives, and built academic-policy networks across multiple international organizations, while developing the first legal framework for governing catastrophic AI risks through Yale University Press. The grant will be a stipend to pay them to finish the book; earlier sections were funded elsewhere.

Stipend for empirical analysis of coalition-building dynamics within AI governance ($40,000)

This 8-month project examines effective AI governance through data-driven analysis of industry influence, regulatory dynamics, and alliance-building strategies, combining systematic collection of corporate metrics with game-theoretic modeling of institutional cooperation. The investigator has developed a long-form interview series exploring emerging technology risks with 50+ episodes, led technical research teams studying multi-agent AI systems, and scaled student organizations focused on AI safety from 20 to 200+ members, while producing policy research on institutional decision-making. The project will be mentored by respected AI policy researchers in an academic setting.

Tuition and partial stipend subsidy for 1 year of doctoral research on security of advanced biotechnologies ($40,000)

This thesis project analyzes emerging biotechnology vulnerabilities through systematic risk assessment of synthesis technologies, developing a timeline-based framework for evaluating bioterrorism pathways, and creating evidence-based policy recommendations for counterterrorism interventions. The investigator has demonstrated strategic leadership in national biosecurity policy implementation, developed computational tools for security applications, and built cross-sector health security networks while maintaining research positions at leading institutions. (The project is partially funded elsewhere)

9 months’ stipend for developing a benchmark for goal-directedness in large language models ($65,000)

We cover 3 people’s stipends for three months to develop a benchmark for assessing goal-directed behavior in language models through simulated environments, adversarial testing, and distributional shift scenarios to measure model robustness and capability trends. The investigators have developed evaluation frameworks showing capability differences across architectures, contributed 25,000+ test cases to public benchmarks, published in peer-reviewed venues, and expanded their research initiative from 4 to 7 members while delivering technical training.

Part-time project for replacing neural networks with interpretable programs ($6,000)

This part-time project aims to create transparent, programmatic replacements for sparse autoencoder neurons in language models by developing symbolic representations in Python, evaluating their predictive accuracy, and measuring their impact on model performance through cross-entropy loss. The investigator has published research on neural network optimization and language model architectures in major ML venues, developed open-source interpretability tools, and demonstrated expertise in language model training and low-level optimization methods across industry and research settings. The investigator has a full-time job in industry and our stipend only covers weekends working on this research project.

One year of costs for an AI safety talent and community-building project in Southeast Asia ($50,000)

This project aims to strengthen the AI safety field across Southeast Asia^[1] by expanding a proven community-building model through targeted social media outreach, local events, and educational programming for high-potential individuals. The organization has grown active membership from 20 to 250+ participants, delivered 10 technical workshops with 85% satisfaction, and partnered with 10 institutions while achieving 45% conversion from initial contact to sustained engagement.

3 years of PhD work on an AI predictability framework to enable safer deployment ($175,000)

This project develops a framework for evaluating and monitoring AI system predictability through behavioral indicator assessment, human-AI interaction analysis across four manifolds, and scalable oversight mechanisms. The investigator has published research on AI system reliability and evaluation in major journals, conducted extensive safety testing of large language models, and contributed evaluation frameworks for assessing AI capabilities and risks while working with leading research institutions and safety organizations.

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The above fictionalized examples illustrate grants that are at or just below our current funding threshold. If these projects seem worth funding to you, please consider donating to us here (alt: every.org).

1. ^{^}

   All proper nouns should be assumed to be fictionalized.