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
We do not have any donee information for the donee Open Phil AI Fellowship in our system.
Full donee page for donee Open Phil AI Fellowship
| 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 | 5 | 1,840,000 | 1,780,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,300,000 | 1,300,000 | 1,840,000 | 1,840,000 | 2,300,000 | 2,300,000 | 2,325,000 | 2,325,000 |
| AI safety | 5 | 1,840,000 | 1,780,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,135,000 | 1,300,000 | 1,300,000 | 1,840,000 | 1,840,000 | 2,300,000 | 2,300,000 | 2,325,000 | 2,325,000 |
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 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI safety (filter this donor) | 5 | 8,900,000.00 | 1,840,000.00 | 1,300,000.00 | 2,300,000.00 | 2,325,000.00 | 1,135,000.00 |
| Total | 5 | 8,900,000.00 | 1,840,000.00 | 1,300,000.00 | 2,300,000.00 | 2,325,000.00 | 1,135,000.00 |
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 5) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,840,000.00 | 3 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2022-class/ | -- | Donation process: The Open Phil AI Fellowship is awarded annually based on an application process. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence-the-open-phil-ai-fellowship/ has more details on the application process. Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grant to provide scholarship to eleven machine learning researchers over five years. Donor reason for selecting the donee: According to the grant page: "These [eleven] fellows were selected for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research. [...] We believe that progress in artificial intelligence may eventually lead to changes in human civilization that are as large as the agricultural or industrial revolutions; while we think it’s most likely that this would lead to significant improvements in human well-being, we also see significant risks. Open Phil AI Fellows have a broad mandate to think through which kinds of research are likely to be most valuable, to share ideas and form a community with like-minded students and professors, and ultimately to act in the way that they think is most likely to improve outcomes from progress in AI. The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): Although the amount per researcher is lower than in previous years (at $1,840,000 over 11 years, it averages to around $170,000 per researcher, less than the $260,000 in the previous year), this reduced amount is partly explained by some of the grantees also receiving funding as Vitalik Buterin Postdoctoral Fellows (see https://futureoflife.org/team/fellowship-winners-2022/ for details); for these grantees, Open Phil and Future of Life Institute split the money equally. Also, regarding the amount, the grant page says: "This is an estimate because of uncertainty around future year tuition costs and currency exchange rates. This number may be updated as costs are finalized." Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is the fourth of annual sets of grants, decided through an annual application process, with the announcement made between April and June each year. The timing may have been chosen to sync with the academic year. Intended funding timeframe in months: 60 Other notes: Five of the eleven grantees (Cynthia Chen, Erik Jenner, Johannes Treutlein, Usman Anwar, and Zhijing Jin) also receiving funding as Vitalik Buterin Postdoctoral Fellows (see https://futureoflife.org/team/fellowship-winners-2022/ for details); for these grantees, Open Phil and Future of Life Institute split the money equally. |
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| 1,300,000.00 | 4 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2021-class | Daniel Dewey | Donation process: According to the grant page: "These [five] fellows were selected from 397 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research." Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grant to provide scholarship to five machine learning researchers over five years. Donor reason for selecting the donee: According to the grant page: "The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence. We plan to host gatherings once or twice per year where fellows can get to know one another, learn about each other’s work, and connect with other researchers who share their interests." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): An explicit reason for the amount is not specified, and the total amount is lower than previous years, but the amount per researcher ($260,000) is a little higher than previous years. It's likely that the amount per researcher is determined first and the total amount is the sum of these. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is the fourth of annual sets of grants, decided through an annual application process, with the announcement made between April and June each year. The timing may have been chosen to sync with the academic year. Intended funding timeframe in months: 60 Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2022-class/ confirms that the program would continue. Other notes: The initial grant page only listed four of the five fellows and an amount of $1,000,000. The fifth fellow, Tan Zhi-Xuan, was added later and the amount was increased to $1,300,000. |
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| 2,300,000.00 | 2 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2020-class | Catherine Olsson Daniel Dewey | Donation process: According to the grant page: "These fellows were selected from more than 380 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research." Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grant to provide scholarship to ten machine learning researchers over five years Donor reason for selecting the donee: According to the grant page: "The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence. We plan to host gatherings once or twice per year where fellows can get to know one another, learn about each other’s work, and connect with other researchers who share their interests." In a comment reply https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DXqxeg3zj6NefR9ZQ/open-philanthropy-our-progress-in-2019-and-plans-for-2020#BCvuhRCg9egAscpyu (GW, IR) on the Effectiive Altruism Forum, grant investigator Catherine Olsson writes: "But the short answer is I think the key pieces to keep in mind are to view the fellowship as 1) a community, not just individual scholarships handed out, and as such also 2) a multi-year project, built slowly." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount is comparable to the total amount of the 2019 fellowship grants, though it is distributed among a slightly larger pool of people. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is the third of annual sets of grants, decided through an annual application process, with the announcement made between April and June each year. The timing may have been chosen to sync with the academic year. Intended funding timeframe in months: 60 Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2021-class (2021) confirms that the program would continue. Other notes: Announced: 2020-05-12. |
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| 2,325,000.00 | 1 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2019-class | Daniel Dewey | Donation process: According to the grant page: "These fellows were selected from more than 175 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research." Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grant to provide scholarship support to eight machine learning researchers over five years Donor reason for selecting the donee: According to the grant page: "The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence. We plan to host gatherings once or twice per year where fellows can get to know one another, learn about each other’s work, and connect with other researchers who share their interests." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount is about double the amount of the 2018 grant, although the number of people supported is just one more (8 instead of 7). No explicit comparison of grant amounts is done in the grant page. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is the second of annual sets of grants, decided through an annual application process, with the announcement made in May/June each year. The timing may have been chosen to sync with the academic year. Intended funding timeframe in months: 60 Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grants https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2020-class (2020) and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2021-class (2021) confirm that the program would continue. Among the grantees, Smitha Milli would receive further support https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/smitha-milli-participatory-approaches-machine-learning-workshop from Open Philanthropy, indicating continued confidence in the support. Other notes: Announced: 2019-05-17. |
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| 1,135,000.00 | 5 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/ai-fellows-program-2018 | Daniel Dewey | Donation process: According to the grant page: "These fellows were selected from more than 180 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research" Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grant to provide scholarship support to seven machine learning researchers over five years Donor reason for selecting the donee: According to the grant page: "The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence. We plan to host gatherings once or twice per year where fellows can get to know one another, learn about each other’s work, and connect with other researchers who share their interests." Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is the first of annual sets of grants, decided through an annual application process. Intended funding timeframe in months: 60 Donor retrospective of the donation: The corresponding grants https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2019-class (2019), https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2020-class (2020), and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/open-phil-ai-fellowship-2021-class (2021) confirm that these grants will be made annually. Among the grantees, Chris Maddison would continue receiving support from Open Philanthropy in the future in the form of support https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-toronto-machine-learning-research for his students, indicating continued endorsement of his work. Other notes: Announced: 2018-05-31. |