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 July 2024. 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 |
| Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions) | GiveWell Good Ventures |
| Best overview URL | https://causeprioritization.org/Open%20Philanthropy%20Project |
| Facebook username | openphilanthropy |
| Website | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ |
| Donations URL | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants |
| Twitter username | open_phil |
| PredictionBook username | OpenPhilUnofficial |
| Page on philosophy informing donations | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/vision-and-values |
| Grant application process page | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers |
| Regularity with which donor updates donations data | continuous updates |
| Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | continuous updates |
| Lag with which donor updates donations data | months |
| Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | days |
| Data entry method on Donations List Website | Manual (no scripts used) |
| Org Watch page | https://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Open+Philanthropy |
Brief history: Open Philanthropy (Open Phil for short) spun off from GiveWell, starting as GiveWell Labs in 2011, beginning to make strong progress in 2013, and formally separating from GiveWell as the "Open Philanthropy Project" in June 2017. In 2020, it started going by "Open Philanthropy" dropping the "Project" word.
Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: Open Philanthropy is focused on openness in two ways: open to ideas about cause selection, and open in explaining what they are doing. It has endorsed "hits-based giving" and is working on areas of AI risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and other global catastrophic risks, criminal justice reform (United States), animal welfare, and some other areas.
Notes on grant decision logistics: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-grantmaking-so-far-approach-and-process for the general grantmaking process and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/questions-we-ask-ourselves-making-grant for more questions that grant investigators are encouraged to consider. Every grant has a grant investigator that we call the influencer here on Donations List Website; for focus areas that have Program Officers, the grant investigator is usually the Program Officer. The grant investigator has been included in grants published since around July 2017. Grants usually need approval from an executive; however, some grant investigators have leeway to make "discretionary grants" where the approval process is short-circuited; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/discretionary-grants for more. Note that the term "discretionary grant" means something different for them compared to government agencies, see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213483361534364 for more.
Notes on grant publication logistics: Every publicly disclosed grant has a writeup published at the time of public disclosure, but the writeups vary significantly in length. Grant writeups are usually written by somebody other than the grant investigator, but approved by the grant investigator as well as the grantee. Grants have three dates associated with them: an internal grant decision date (that is not publicly revealed but is used in some statistics on total grant amounts decided by year), a grant date (which we call donation date; this is the date of the formal grant commitment, which is the published grant date), and a grant announcement date (which we call donation announcement date; the date the grant is announced to the mailing list and the grant page made publicly visible). Lags are a few months between decision and grant, and a few months between grant and announcement, due to time spent with grant writeup approval.
Notes on grant financing: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers or https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/who-we-are for more information. Grants generally come from the Open Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with most of its money coming from Good Ventures. Some grants are made directly by Good Ventures, and political grants may be made by the Open Philanthropy Action Fund. At least one grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/working-families-party-prosecutor-reforms-new-york was made by Cari Tuna personally. The majority of grants are financed by the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; however, the source of financing of a grant is not always explicitly specified, so it cannot be confidently assumed that a grant with no explicit listed financing is financed through the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; see the comment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Funding for multi-year grants is usually disbursed annually, and the amounts are often equal across years, but not always. The fact that a grant is multi-year, or the distribution of the grant amount across years, are not always explicitly stated on the grant page; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Some grants to universities are labeled "gifts" but this is a donee classification, based on different levels of bureaucratic overhead and funder control between grants and gifts; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information.
Miscellaneous notes: Most GiveWell-recommended grants made by Good Ventures and listed in the Open Philanthropy database are not listed on Donations List Website as being under Open Philanthropy. Specifically, GiveWell Incubation Grants are not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=GiveWell+Incubation+Grants with donor GiveWell Incubation Grants), and grants made by Good Ventures to GiveWell top and standout charities are also not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+top+and+standout+charities with donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities). Grants to support GiveWell operations are not included here; they can be found at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+support with donor "Good Ventures/GiveWell support".The investment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/impossible-foods in Impossible Foods is not included because it does not fit our criteria for a donation, and also because no amount was included. All other grants publicly disclosed by open philanthropy that are not GiveWell Incubation Grants or GiveWell top and standout charity grants should be included. Grants disclosed by grantees but not yet disclosed by Open Philanthropy are not included; some of them may be listed at https://issarice.com/open-philanthropy-project-non-grant-funding
Full donor page for donor Open Philanthropy
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Website | https://mila.quebec/en/ |
| Open Philanthropy Project grant review | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/montreal-institute-learning-algorithms-ai-safety-research |
| Org Watch page | https://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Mila |
| Key people | Yoshua Bengio |
| Launch date | 1993 |
| Notes | Founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio as Laboratoire d’Informatique des Systèmes Adaptatifs (LISA) https://web.archive.org/web/20050203120541/http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lisa/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140912000123/http://lisa.iro.umontreal.ca/index.html and renamed to MILA around 2015 https://web.archive.org/web/20150323002324/https://sites.google.com/a/lisa.iro.umontreal.ca/mila/ |
Full donee page for donee Mila
| Item | Value |
|---|
| 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 | 3 | 237,931 | 895,977 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 237,931 | 237,931 | 237,931 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 |
| AI safety | 3 | 237,931 | 895,977 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 237,931 | 237,931 | 237,931 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 | 2,400,000 |
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 | Total | 2023 | 2021 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI safety (filter this donor) | 3 | 2,687,931.00 | 50,000.00 | 237,931.00 | 2,400,000.00 |
| Total | 3 | 2,687,931.00 | 50,000.00 | 237,931.00 | 2,400,000.00 |
Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)
Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)
There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.
Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations
| Amount (current USD) | Amount rank (out of 3) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50,000.00 | 3 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/mila-workshop-on-human-level-ai/ | -- | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support a workshop on human-level artificial intelligence, led by Professor Jacob Steinhardt, that will bring together experts on AI and AI alignment." Other notes: Intended funding timeframe in months: 1. |
|
| 237,931.00 | 2 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/mila-research-project-on-artificial-intelligence/ | Luke Muehlhauser | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support a research project investigating AI consciousness and moral patienthood. The research will be conducted in collaboration with the Université de Montréal and the Future of Humanity Institute. This funding will support postdoctoral researchers and students studying the topic, as well as publications and workshops." Other notes: Currency info: donation given as 295,900.00 CAD (conversion done via donor calculation). |
|
| 2,400,000.00 | 1 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/montreal-institute-for-learning-algorithms-ai-safety-research/ | -- | Donation process: The grant page says: "We spoke with Professor Bengio and several of his students during our recent outreach to machine learning researchers and formed a positive impression of him and his work. Our technical advisors spoke highly of Professor Bengio’s capabilities, reputation, and goals." Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support technical research on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence (AI). $1.6 million of this grant will support Professor Yoshua Bengio and his co-investigators at the Université de Montréal, and $800,000 will support Professors Joelle Pineau and Doina Precup at McGill University. We see Professor Bengio’s research group as one of the world’s preeminent deep learning labs and are excited to provide support for it to undertake AI safety research." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "Among potential grantees in the field, we believe that Professor Bengio is one of the best positioned to help build the talent pipeline in AI safety research. Our understanding, based on conversations with our technical advisors and our general impressions from the field, is that many of the most talented machine learning researchers spend some time in Professor Bengio’s lab before joining other universities or industry groups. This is an important contributing factor to our expectations for the impact of this grant, both because it increases our confidence in the quality of the research that this grant will support and because of the potential benefits for pipeline building. In our conversations with Professor Bengio, we’ve found significant overlap between his perspective on AI safety and ours, and Professor Bengio was excited to be part of our overall funding activities in this area. We think that Professor Bengio is likely to serve as a valuable member of the AI safety research community, and that he will encourage his lab to be involved in that community as well. We believe that members of his lab could likely be valuable participants at future workshops on AI safety." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The grant page says: "Our impression is that MILA is already fairly well-funded, and that its ability to use additional marginal funding is somewhat limited. Professor Bengio told us that the amount of additional yearly funding that he would be able to use productively for AI safety research is $400,000; we have decided to grant this full amount for four years ($1.6 million total). We have also granted two of Professor Bengio’s co-investigators at MILA who are also interested in working on this agenda, Professors Pineau and Precup, $200,000 per year ($800,000 total), which they estimated as the amount of funding they would be able to use productively." Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: The grant page says: "We expect to have a conversation with Professor Bengio six months after the start of the grant, and annually after that, to discuss his projects and results, with public notes if the conversation warrants it. In the first few months of the grant, we plan to visit Montreal for several days to meet Professor Bengio’s co-investigators and discuss the project with them. At the conclusion of this grant in 2020, we will decide whether to renew our support. If Professor Bengio’s research is going well (based on our technical advisors’ assessment and the impressions of others in the field), and if we have achieved a better mutual understanding with Professor Bengio about how his research is likely to be valuable, it is likely that we will decide to provide renewed funding. If Professor Bengio is using half or more of our funding to pursue research directions that we do not find particularly promising, it is likely that we would choose not to renew." Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/mila-research-project-on-artificial-intelligence/ suggests continued satisfaction with the grantee, though the amount of this followup grant is much smaller and the scope narrower than that of the original grant. Other notes: See also https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10110258359382500&id=13963931 for a Facebook share by David Krueger, a member of the grantee organization. The comments include some discussion about the grantee. Intended funding timeframe in months: 48; announced: 2017-07-19. |