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 | United States |
| Facebook page | UCBerkeley |
| Website | https://www.berkeley.edu/ |
| Donate page | https://give.berkeley.edu/?sc=111443 |
| Twitter username | UCBerkeley |
| Wikipedia page | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Berkeley |
| Instagram username | ucberkeleyofficial |
| Medium username | UCBerkeley |
| Org Watch page | https://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=University+of+California%2C+Berkeley |
Full donee page for donee University of California, Berkeley
| 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 | 10 | 330,000 | 1,048,542 | 87,829 | 87,829 | 131,579 | 200,000 | 330,000 | 330,000 | 700,000 | 1,111,000 | 1,145,000 | 1,450,016 | 5,000,000 |
| AI safety | 6 | 330,000 | 742,308 | 87,829 | 87,829 | 330,000 | 330,000 | 330,000 | 330,000 | 1,111,000 | 1,145,000 | 1,145,000 | 1,450,016 | 1,450,016 |
| Animal welfare | 2 | 131,579 | 415,790 | 131,579 | 131,579 | 131,579 | 131,579 | 131,579 | 131,579 | 700,000 | 700,000 | 700,000 | 700,000 | 700,000 |
| Scientific research | 2 | 200,000 | 2,600,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 5,000,000 | 5,000,000 | 5,000,000 | 5,000,000 | 5,000,000 |
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 | 2021 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scientific research (filter this donor) | 2 | 5,200,000.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 200,000.00 | 5,000,000.00 |
| AI safety (filter this donor) | 6 | 4,453,845.00 | 747,829.00 | 1,111,000.00 | 1,145,000.00 | 1,450,016.00 |
| Animal welfare (filter this donor) | 2 | 831,579.00 | 0.00 | 831,579.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Total | 10 | 10,485,424.00 | 747,829.00 | 1,942,579.00 | 1,345,000.00 | 6,450,016.00 |
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 10) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 87,829.00 | 10 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-research-aditi-raghunathan/ | -- | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant to "support postdoctoral research by Aditi Raghunathan on adversarial robustness as a means to improve AI safety." Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/carnegie-mellon-university-research-on-adversarial-examples/ for the continuation of the grantee's work at Carnegie Mellon University suggests satisfaction with the grant outcome. Other notes: The grant page says: "The grant amount was updated in July 2023.". |
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| 330,000.00 | 6 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-song | Catherine Olsson Daniel Dewey | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support research by Professor Dawn Song on adversarial robustness as a means to improve AI safety." Donor reason for selecting the donee: This is one of five grants made by the donor for "adversarial robustness research" in January and February 2021, all with the same grant investigators (Catherine Olsson and Daniel Dewey) except the Santa Cruz grant that had Olsson and Nick Beckstead. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/mit-adversarial-robustness-research https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-wagner are the foour other grants.It looks like the donor became interested in funding this research topic at this time. Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): No explicit reasons for the amount are given, but the amount is similar to the amounts for other grants from Open Philanthropy to early-stage researchers in adversarial robustness research. This includes three other grants https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-wagner and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein made at the same time as well as grants later in the year to early-stage researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and University of Southern California. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is one of five grants made by the donor for "adversarial robustness research" in Januaay and February 2021, all with the same grant investigators (Catherine Olsson and Daniel Dewey) except the Santa Cruz grant that had Olsson and Nick Beckstead. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/mit-adversarial-robustness-research https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-wagner are the four other grants. It looks like the donor became interested in funding this research topic at this time. Intended funding timeframe in months: 36 |
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| 330,000.00 | 6 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-wagner | Catherine Olsson Daniel Dewey | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support research by Professor David Wagner on adversarial robustness as a means to improve AI safety." Donor reason for selecting the donee: This is one of five grants made by the donor for "adversarial robustness research" in January and February 2021, all with the same grant investigators (Catherine Olsson and Daniel Dewey) except the Santa Cruz grant that had Olsson and Nick Beckstead. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/mit-adversarial-robustness-research https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-song are the four other grants. It looks like the donor became interested in funding this research topic at this time. Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): No explicit reasons for the amount are given, but the amount is similar to the amounts for other grants from Open Philanthropy to early-stage researchers in adversarial robustness research. This includes three other grants https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-song made at the same time as well as grants later in the year to early-stage researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and University of Southern California. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): This is one of five grants made by the donor for "adversarial robustness research" in January and February 2021, all with the same grant investigators (Catherine Olsson and Daniel Dewey) except the Santa Cruz grant that had Olsson and Nick Beckstead. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-santa-cruz-xie-adversarial-robustness https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/mit-adversarial-robustness-research https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-tuebingen-adversarial-robustness-hein and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-adversarial-robustness-song are the four other grants. It looks like the donor became interested in funding this research topic at this time. Intended funding timeframe in months: 36 |
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| 1,111,000.00 | 4 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-ai-safety-research-2019 | Daniel Dewey | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: The grant page says: "This funding will allow Professor Steinhardt to fund students to work on robustness, value learning, aggregating preferences, and other areas of machine learning." Other notes: This is the third year that Open Phil makes a grant for AI safety research to the University of California, Berkeley (excluding the founding grant for the Center for Human-Compatible AI). It continues an annual tradition of multi-year grants to the University of California, Berkeley announced in October/November, though the researchers would be different each year. Note that the grant is to UC Berkeley, but at least one of the researchers (Jacob Steinhardt) is affiliated with the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Intended funding timeframe in months: 36; announced: 2020-02-19. |
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| 700,000.00 | 5 | Animal welfare/meat alternatives/plant-based meat/talent pipeline | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/uc-berkeley-alternate-meats-lab-october-2019 | Lewis Bollard | Donation process: Discretionary grant Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support the Alternative Meats Lab, housed at The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "This grant may help spur new startups developing alternatives to animal products, and could help build the talent pipeline for existing companies working in this space." This is a followup to a smaller grant of $131,579 (2019-01) for a similar purpose. |
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| 131,579.00 | 9 | Animal welfare/meat alternatives/plant-based meat/talent pipeline | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/uc-berkeley-alternate-meats-lab | Lewis Bollard | Donation process: Discretionary grant Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support the Alternative Meats Lab, housed at The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. The lab is the outgrowth of a class on developing animal product alternatives." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "This grant may help spur new startups developing alternatives to animal products, and could help build the talent pipeline for existing startups working in this space." Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/uc-berkeley-alternate-meats-lab-october-2019 for a similar purpose but much larger amount suggests continued satisfaction with the grantee. Other notes: Announced: 2019-02-21. |
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| 1,145,000.00 | 3 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/university-of-california-berkeley-artificial-intelligence-safety-research-2018 | Daniel Dewey | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "for machine learning researchers Pieter Abbeel and Aviv Tamar to study uses of generative models for robustness and interpretability. This funding will allow Mr. Abbeel and Mr. Tamar to fund PhD students and summer undergraduates to work on classifiers, imitation learning systems, and reinforcement learning systems." Other notes: This is the second year that Open Phil makes a grant for AI safety research to the University of California, Berkeley (excluding the founding grant for the Center for Human-Compatible AI). It continues an annual tradition of multi-year grants to the University of California, Berkeley announced in October/November, though the researchers would be different each year. Note that the grant is to UC Berkeley, but at least one of the researchers (Pieter Abbeel) is affiliated with the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Intended funding timeframe in months: 36; announced: 2018-12-11. |
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| 200,000.00 | 8 | Scientific research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/university-of-california-berkeley-research-on-drought-tolerant-rice-by-prof-brian-staskawicz | Chris Somerville Heather Youngs | Discretionary grant over three years to support the editing of the rice genome for increased drought tolerance led by Professor Brian Staskawicz. The work involves using CRISPR modifications to increase drought tolerance on Indian rice, and the goal is to address the problem of erratic rice yields which have negative impoact on the livelihoods of 100 million small farmers. The experiments are funded in part my a match from the Innovative Genomics Institute. This follows the plant pathology workshop grant of December 2016 https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/uc-berkeley-plant-pathology-workshop. Announced: 2018-10-23. | |
| 1,450,016.00 | 2 | AI safety/technical research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/uc-berkeley-ai-safety-levine-dragan | Daniel Dewey | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: The grant page says: "The work will be led by Professors Sergey Levine and Anca Dragan, who will each devote approximately 20% of their time to the project, with additional assistance from four graduate students. They initially intend to focus their research on how objective misspecification can produce subtle or overt undesirable behavior in robotic systems, though they have the flexibility to adjust their focus during the grant period." The project narrative is at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/UC_Berkeley/Levine_Dragan_Project_Narrative_2017.pdf Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "Our broad goals for this funding are to encourage top researchers to work on AI alignment and safety issues in order to build a pipeline for young researchers; to support progress on technical problems; and to generally support the growth of this area of study." Other notes: This is the first year that Open Phil makes a grant for AI safety research to the University of California, Berkeley (excluding the founding grant for the Center for Human-Compatible AI). It would begin an annual tradition of multi-year grants to the University of California, Berkeley announced in October/November, though the researchers would be different each year. Note that the grant is to UC Berkeley, but at least one of the researchers (Anca Dragan) is affiliated with the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Intended funding timeframe in months: 48; announced: 2017-10-20. |
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| 5,000,000.00 | 1 | Scientific research | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/uc-berkeley-aging-related-research-conboy | Heather Youngs | Grant over five years to support research on the basic biology of aging-related diseases and impairments, led by Dr. Irina Conboy. Grant is a result of https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/mechanisms-aging (investigation into mechanisms of aging). Announced: 2017-11-03. |