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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Future Fund June 2022 Update, published by Nick Beckstead on July 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Background The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund publicly launched in late February. We're a philanthropic fund that makes grants and investments to improve humanity's long-term prospects. For information about some of the areas we've been funding, see our Areas of Interest page. This is our first public update on the Future Fund’s grantmaking. The purpose of this post is to give an update on what we’ve done and what we're learning about the funding models we're testing. (It does not cover a range of other FTX Foundation activities.) We’ve also published a new grants page and regrants page with our public grants so far. Our focus on testing funding models We are trying to learn as much as we can about how to deploy funding at scale to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. Our primary objective for 2022 is to perform bold and decisive tests of new funding models. The main funding models we have tested so far are our regranting program and our open call for applications. In brief, these models worked as follows: The basic idea of regranting was, "There are a lot of people who share our values and might know of great people or projects we could support that we wouldn't know about by default. Let's make it rewarding, simple, and fast for them to make grants. We'll give them budgets of $100k to a few million to work with, and we'll presumptively approve their recommendations (after screening for various risks/issues)." The basic idea of the open call was, "Let's tell people what we're trying to do, what kinds of things we might be interested in funding, give them a lot of examples of projects they could launch, have an easy and fast application process, and then get the word out with Twitter blitz." We wrote some about the review process here. Our staff also made grants and investments that were not part of these programs (hereafter "staff-led grantmaking"). Grantmaking by funding model So far we have made 262 grants and investments, totaling ~$132M. These break down as follows: Regranting: We have onboarded >100 regrantors (with discretionary budgets) and >50 grant recommenders (without discretionary budgets). We set aside >$100M for them to use over the course of our 6 month experiment (April-October 2022). So far, regrantors have made 168 grants and investments, totaling ~$31M Open call: We received over 1700 applications and funded 69 (4%) of them, totaling ~$26M. (The acceptance rate for proposals focused squarely on our top priorities was much higher.) Staff-led grantmaking: Separate from these programs, we have made 25 grants and investments otherwise sourced by our staff, totaling ~$73M. There are also ~$25M of grants we are likely to make soon, but have some relevant aspects TBD. Some example grants and investments Below are some grants and investments that we find interesting and/or representative of what we are trying to fund. Regranting $1M investment in Manifold Markets to build a play-money prediction market platform. The platform is also experimenting with impact certificates and charity prediction markets. $490k for ML Safety Scholars Program to fund a summer program for up to 100 students to spend 9 weeks studying machine learning, deep learning, and technical topics in AI safety. We have funded >30 talent development and career transition grants that range from $1,450 to $175,000 depending on the duration and seniority level of the individual. Some examples include: $42,600 to Andi Peng to support salary and compute for research on AI alignment. $175,000 to Braden Leach to support a recent law school graduate to work on biosecurity, researching and writing at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. $37,500 to Thomas Kwa to support researc...