5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors

plus updates on what Manifund has been up to

What do I mean by “homegrown”? These projects are:

• Local: Creators have a good track record in the EA or AI Safety community

• Modest: The amount requested is not large; $5k would be meaningful

• Overlooked: Not already backed by large institutional funders like OpenPhil

If you’re a small donor or earn to give, consider giving to projects like these:

1. Feature-length documentary on SB 1047

By Michael Trazzi — $16k raised of $55k

Michael has already recorded interviews with the main characters of SB 1047: sponsors like Scott Wiener and Dan Hendrycks, proponents like Zvi Mowshowitz and Holly Elmore, and opponents like Dean Ball and Timothy B Lee. Now he needs the funding to turn it into a 1-hour feature documentary. This is a rare chance to sponsor a high-quality video narrative, and share it beyond our existing ecosystem. I’ve personally donated $10k towards this, and expect Michael to be able to effectively use much more.

More info & donate here: https://manifund.org/projects/finishing-the-sb-1047-documentary-in-6-weeks

2. Overview of AI Safety in 2024

By Gavin Leech — $8k of $17.6k raised

Gavin Leech is a forecaster, researcher and founder of Arb; he’s proposing to re-rerun a 2023 survey of AI Safety. The landscape shifts pretty quickly, so I’d love to see what’s changed since last year.

As I was writing this, regrantor Neel Nanda funded it to the minimum $8k ask! Neel adds:

I think collections like this add significant value to newcomers to the field, mostly by being a list of all areas worth maybe thinking about, and key links (rather than eg by providing a lot of takes on which areas are more or less important, unless the author has excellent taste). Gavin has convinced me that the previous post gets enough traffic for it be valuable to be kept up to date.

More info & donate here: https://manifund.org/projects/shallow-review-of-ai-safety-2024

3. Podcast series on Effective Altruism’s values

By Elizabeth Van Nostrand — $1.3k raised of $2.6k

Elizabeth & Timothy’s initial podcast was very well received, drawing extensive, thoughtful comments from a variety of folks. I’d be excited to see them continue this series, especially if they bring in folks involved with steering the EA community (like Sarah Cheng, who has extensively engaged with their points)

More info & donate here: https://manifund.org/projects/elizabeth-and-timothy-podcast-on-values-in-effective-altruism

4. Sentinel, a foresight and emergency response team

By Nuno Sempere — $16k raised of $90k

Nuno has long been one of our community’s most outspoken forecasters; now he’s working with Rai Sur to spin up an emergency response team (think: Army Reserve Corps, but for responding to existential risks). They’re already putting out a useful weekly report on biosecurity, geopolitics and other such topics.

More info & donate here: https://manifund.org/projects/fund-sentinel-for-q4-2024

5. Research on co-occurence of sparse autoencoder latents

By Matthew A. Clarke — $0 raised of $6.4k

TBH, I don’t know much about the merits for or against this line of research; I’m highlighting this grant because it’s overseen by Joseph Bloom, a past Manifund grantee who I and others have been very impressed with. If mechanistic interpretability is your jam, check this one out!

More info & donate here: https://manifund.org/projects/salaries-for-sae-co-occurrence-project

What else have we been up to?

It’s been a quiet couple of months, but here’s what Rachel and I have been busy with:

• Organizing The Curve, a premier conference on transformative AI

• Wrapping up EA Community Choice and paying out grants (writeup to come, someday…)

  • Did you see that Marc Andreessen donated $32k to one of the projects 😮

• Filing our taxes Form 990 for 2023. Last year, we raised ~$3m and disbursed ~$2.6m!

• Waiting on Survival and Flourishing Funds to get back to us on our funding request

• Hacking on a system to spin up web apps from a single LLM prompt

• Dreaming about a new coworking space like Constellation or Lighthaven, but in SF

• And of course, taking some time off to care for our newborn baby, Ada

Cheers,

Austin

PS: want to make a larger grant? Manifund can facilitate donations via donor advised funds, crypto, and bank transfers.