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Future Fund June 2022 Update

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2022·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/paMYXYFYbbjpdjgbt/futur...

Authors

Nick_Beckstead·leopold·ab·William_MacAskill·ketanrama

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 update is historically notable as FTX Future Fund was a major AI safety funder in 2022 before FTX's collapse in November 2022, which led to the fund's dissolution and significant disruption to grantees.

Metadata

Importance: 35/100news

Summary

A mid-year update from the FTX Future Fund detailing their grantmaking progress, priorities, and portfolio as of June 2022. The fund focused on areas including AI safety, biosecurity, and other existential risks, sharing reflections on their strategy and lessons learned in their first months of operation.

Key Points

  • •Reports on grant funding disbursed across priority areas including AI safety, biorisk, and civilizational resilience since launch
  • •Outlines the fund's evolving thinking on cause prioritization and how they evaluate opportunities for impact
  • •Highlights specific grants and investments made in the AI safety space as part of a broader existential risk reduction strategy
  • •Reflects on operational challenges and lessons learned in scaling a major philanthropic initiative rapidly
  • •Signals continued large-scale funding availability for high-impact projects, particularly in technical and governance AI safety

Cached Content Preview

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# Future Fund June 2022 Update
By Nick_Beckstead, leopold, ab, William_MacAskill, ketanrama
Published: 2022-07-01
Summary
=======

Background
----------

The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund [publicly launched](https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-the-future-fund/) 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](https://ftxfuturefund.org/area-of-interest/). 

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](https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/) and [regrants page](https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-regrants/) 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](https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-2022-plans/) is to perform bold and decisive tests of new funding models. The main funding models we have tested so far are our [regranting program](https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-our-regranting-program/) and our [open call](https://twitter.com/ftxfuturefund/status/1498350483206860801) for applications. 

In brief, these models worked as follows:

*   The basic idea of [regranting](https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-our-regranting-program/) 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](https://ftxfuturefund.org/principles/), what kinds of [things we might be interested in funding](https://ftxfuturefund.org/area-of-interest/), give them a lot of [examples of projects they could launch](https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/), have an [easy and fast application process](https://ftxfuturefund.org/apply/), and then [get the word out with Twitter blitz](https://twitter.com/ftxfuturefund/status/1498350483206860801)." We wrote some about the review process [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hDK9CZJwH2Cqc9n9J/some-clarifications-on-the-future-fund-s-approach-to).
*   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 follo

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