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2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?

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2021·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ps8ecFPBzSrkLC6ip/2018-...

Author

NunoSempere

Credibility Rating

3/5
Good(3)

Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.

Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum

This EA Forum post retrospectively evaluates early Long-Term Future Fund grants, offering useful data on funding effectiveness in the AI safety and existential risk philanthropic ecosystem.

Metadata

Importance: 42/100analysis

Summary

A retrospective analysis evaluating the outcomes of grants made by the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) in 2018-2019, assessing whether funded individuals and projects delivered on their potential. The post examines what grantees went on to accomplish, providing accountability and lessons for effective philanthropic allocation in the existential risk and AI safety space.

Key Points

  • •Tracks career trajectories and project outcomes of early LTFF grantees to assess grant-making effectiveness in the long-term future space.
  • •Provides a rare empirical look at whether early-career funding in AI safety and EA-adjacent fields produces meaningful contributions.
  • •Helps inform future grant-making strategy by identifying what types of individuals and projects yielded high returns.
  • •Illustrates the challenges of evaluating impact in speculative, long-horizon fields where results may take years to materialize.
  • •Serves as a model for philanthropic accountability and transparency in the EA funding ecosystem.

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# 2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?
By NunoSempere
Published: 2021-06-16
**Introduction**
----------------

At the suggestion of Ozzie Gooen, I looked at publicly available information around past LTF grantees. We've been investigating the potential to have more evaluations of EA projects, and the LTFF grantees seemed to represent some of the best examples, as they passed a fairly high bar and were cleanly delimited.

For this project, I personally investigated each proposal without consulting many others. This work was clearly limited by not reaching out to others directly, but requesting external involvement would have increased costs significantly. We were also partially interested in finding how much we could figure out with this limitation.

**Background**
--------------

During its first two rounds ([round 1](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/payouts/march-2017-berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-beri), [round 2](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/payouts/july-2018-long-term-future-fund-grants)) of the LTF fund, under the leadership of Nick Beckstead, grants went mostly to established organizations, and didn’t have informative write-ups. 

The next few rounds, under the leadership of Habryka et. al., have more informative write-ups, and a higher volume of grants, which are generally more speculative. At the time, some of the grants were scathingly criticised in the comments. The LTF at this point feels like a different, more active beast than under Nick Beckstead. I evaluated its grants from the [November 2018](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/payouts/november-2018-long-term-future-fund-grants) and [April 2019](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions) rounds, meaning that the grantees have had at least two years to produce some legible output. Commenters pointed out that the 2018 LTFF is pretty different from the 2021 LTFF, so it’s not clear how much to generalize from the projects reviewed in this post.

Despite the trend towards longer writeups, the reasoning for some of these grants is sometimes opaque to me, or the grant makers sometimes have more information than I do, and choose not to publish it. 

**Summary**
-----------

### **By outcome**

<table><tbody><tr><td style="border:1pt solid #000000;padding:5pt;vertical-align:top">Flag</td><td style="border:1pt solid #000000;padding:5pt;vertical-align:top">Number of grants</td><td style="border:1pt solid #000000;padding:5pt;vertical-align:top">Funding ($)</td></tr><tr><td style="border:1pt solid #000000;padding:5pt;vertical-align:top"><p>More successful than expected</p><figure class="image image_resized" style="width:20px"><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/ouTRjR1aMmFx-74tTpbb8AXZzJGbqqt-X2wZyx5SX5MXo7cfFYF1aijBZy2Z6Lgl5npgEGCsnb3gcL7NJqixmBMm8L2DjmTV82FzRn93jkvdygpzxo9j5vsZhBgqJ0nroY7lmUs5"></figure></td><td style="border:1pt solid #000000;padding:5pt;vertica

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