This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of December 2019. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Facebook username | Berkeley-Existential-Risk-Initiative-1875638366085846 |
| Website | http://existence.org/ |
| Data entry method on Donations List Website | Manual (no scripts used) |
| Org Watch page | https://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Berkeley+Existential+Risk+Initiative |
| Cause area | Count | Median | Mean | Minimum | 10th percentile | 20th percentile | 30th percentile | 40th percentile | 50th percentile | 60th percentile | 70th percentile | 80th percentile | 90th percentile | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 36 | 50,000 | 99,612 | 1,900 | 10,000 | 20,000 | 24,000 | 25,200 | 50,000 | 55,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 300,000 | 800,000 |
| AI safety | 30 | 50,000 | 110,268 | 1,900 | 10,000 | 20,000 | 20,500 | 32,500 | 50,000 | 55,000 | 100,000 | 150,000 | 300,000 | 800,000 |
| Existential risks | 4 | 25,000 | 38,500 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Rationality community | 1 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 | 24,000 |
| Rationality improvement | 1 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.
Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.
| Cause area | Number of donations | Number of donees | Total | 2018 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI safety (filter this donor) | 30 | 22 | 3,308,032.00 | 2,838,032.00 | 470,000.00 |
| Existential risks (filter this donor) | 4 | 4 | 154,000.00 | 129,000.00 | 25,000.00 |
| Rationality improvement (filter this donor) | 1 | 1 | 100,000.00 | 100,000.00 | 0.00 |
| Rationality community (filter this donor) | 1 | 1 | 24,000.00 | 24,000.00 | 0.00 |
| Total | 36 | 26 | 3,586,032.00 | 3,091,032.00 | 495,000.00 |
Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)
Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)
If you hover over a cell for a given subcause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.
For the meaning of “classified” and “unclassified”, see the page clarifying this.
| Subcause area | Number of donations | Number of donees | Total | 2018 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI safety | 30 | 22 | 3,308,032.00 | 2,838,032.00 | 470,000.00 |
| Existential risks | 4 | 4 | 154,000.00 | 129,000.00 | 25,000.00 |
| Rationality improvement | 1 | 1 | 100,000.00 | 100,000.00 | 0.00 |
| Rationality community | 1 | 1 | 24,000.00 | 24,000.00 | 0.00 |
| Classified total | 36 | 26 | 3,586,032.00 | 3,091,032.00 | 495,000.00 |
| Unclassified total | 0 | 0 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Total | 36 | 26 | 3,586,032.00 | 3,091,032.00 | 495,000.00 |
Graph of spending by subcause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)
Graph of spending by subcause area and year (cumulative)
Graph of spending by donee and year (incremental, not cumulative)
Graph of spending by donee and year (cumulative)
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| Title (URL linked) | Publication date | Author | Publisher | Affected donors | Affected donees | Document scope | Cause area | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New grants from the Open Philanthropy Project and BERI | 2019-04-01 | Rob Bensinger | Machine Intelligence Research Institute | Open Philanthropy Project Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Machine Intelligence Research Institute | Donee periodic update | AI safety | MIRI announces two grants to it: a two-year grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/machine-intelligence-research-institute-general-support-2019 totaling $2,112,500 from the Open Philanthropy Project, with half of it disbursed in 2019 and the other half disbursed in 2020. The amount disbursed in 2019 (of a little over $1.06 million) is on top of the $1.25 million already committed by the Open Philanthropy Project as part of the 3-year $3.75 million grant https://intelligence.org/2017/11/08/major-grant-open-phil/ The $1.06 million in 2020 may be supplemented by further grants from the Open Philanthropy Project. The grant size from the Open Philanthropy Project was determined by the Committee for Effective Altruism Support. The post also notes that the Open Philanthropy Project plans to determine future grant sizes using the Committee. MIRI expects the grant money to play an important role in decision-making as it executes on growing its research team as described in its 2018 strategy update post https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/ and fundraiser post https://intelligence.org/2018/11/26/miris-2018-fundraiser/ |
| Seeking Testimonials - IPR, Leverage, and Paradigm | 2018-11-15 | Andrew Critch | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Leverage Research Institute for Philosophical Research Paradigm Academy | Request for reviews of donee | Rationality improvement | In the blog post, Andrew Critch of BERI talks about plans to make grants to Leverage Research and the Institute for Philosophical Research (IPR). Critch says that IPR, Leverage, and Paradigm Academy are three related organizations that BERI internally refers to as ILP. In light of communtiy skepticism about ILP, Critch announces that BERI is inviting feedback through a feedback form on these organizations till December 20. He also explains what sort of feedback will be taken more seriously by BERI. The post was also announced on the Effective Altruism Forum at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fvvRZMJJ7g4gzXjSH/seeking-information-on-three-potential-grantee-organizations on 2018-12-09 |
| A model I use when making plans to reduce AI x-risk | 2018-01-18 | Ben Pace | LessWrong | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Review of current state of cause area | AI safety | The author describes his implicit model of AI risk, with four parts: (1) Alignment is hard, (2) Getting alignment right accounts for most of the variance in whether an AGI system will be positive for humanity, (3) Our current epistemic state regarding AGI timelines will continue until we are close (<2 years from) to having AGI, and (4) Given timeline uncertainty, it is best to spend marginal effort on plans that assume / work in shorter timelines. There is a lot of discussion in the comments | |
| Announcing BERI Computing Grants | 2017-12-01 | Andrew Critch | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Donee periodic update | AI safety/other global catastrophic risks | |
| Forming an engineering team | 2017-10-25 | Andrew Critch | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Donee periodic update | AI safety/other global catastrophic risks | ||
| What we’re thinking about as we grow - ethics, oversight, and getting things done | 2017-10-19 | Andrew Critch | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Donee periodic update | AI safety/other global catastrophic risks | Outlines BERI's approach to growth and "ethics" (transparency, oversight, trust, etc.). |
| BERI's semi-annual report, August | 2017-09-12 | Rebecca Raible | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative | Donee periodic update | AI safety/other global catastrophic risks | A blog post announcing BERI's semi-annual report. |
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