Longform app: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBJ_TNE7DpIhOELhhHDBTyHxwGut6abCAL035N-zZEs/edit
Impact track record
What have been your organization’s highest impact contributions to the reduction of existential risk, or other efforts to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing, so far? Please provide 2 to 10 written documents, presentations, interviews, or event records demonstrating these (if part of a collaboration, please describe the extent to which your organization was responsible for each).
1. AI Safety regranting (about)
- Manifund has run 2 rounds of AI Safety regranting, $1.5mm each in 2023 and 2024
- Our regrantors include Leopold Aschenbrenner, Evan Hubinger, Adam Gleave, Neel Nanda, Ryan Kidd, Dan Hendrycks, and Tristan Hume
- Our platform supports fast, public grants based on regrantors’s personal judgements
2. ACX Grants (grants, about)
- Manifund handles donations and fiscally sponsors Scott Alexander’s ACX Grants 2024
- We facilitated $1.3m of donations towards 33 projects chosen by Scott
- We also set up an impact market for 53 other projects, with retro funding from EA Funds, SFF, and future ACX Grants rounds
3. Crowdfunding (projects)
- Manifund lets researchers and founders raise funding for AI safety, EA and related projects
- This enables a range of individuals in the EA community to directly fund projects they care about. Donors include Beth Barnes, Peter Wildeford, Peter McCluskey, Gavin Leech, Jueyan Zhang, and several Jane Street and OpenAI employees.
4. Impact certificates (link)
- Manifund has experimented with impact certificates as a more efficient mechanism for funding public goods
- We’ve run 5 different funding rounds; the largest rounds were ACX Grants 2024 (ongoing), the Manifold Community Fund, and ACX Forecasting Minigrants
5. Manifest (website, schedule, reviews)
- Manifest is a festival for predictions, markets, and mechanisms. Topics covered include forecasting, AI, economics, finance, culture and biology.
- Ran in Sep 2023 with ~250 attendees, and Jun 2024 with ~550 attendees. Highly rated by attendees, eg “one of the best weekends of my life and easily the best conference I’ve ever been to”.