Lightcone Infrastructure

Donating 50k. Lightcone's main projects – Lighthaven, Lesswrong, and websites for good causes – all seem very valuable for making AI go well. I would like there to be more AI safety events, better public discussion of AIS ideas, and more big comms efforts. I trust the Lightcone team a lot: they have good taste, are thoughtful and caring, and have interestingly different views on how to make AI go well from many other orgs I spend a lot of time around. I'd like to give them more financial security, so they can run their core products and have the freedom to try new things.

Donating ~half of my remaining regranting funding ($25k). While this is not in the category of things I wanted to fund with the regranting pot (i.e. individuals working on scheming research), I think Lighthaven is worth supporting.

My main evidence is that my MATS scholars really like it and when I've been at Lighthaven for conferences or other meetings I thought it was a great venue.

One caveat is that I think Lighthaven should be funded through institutional donors rather than many small grants due to the obvious overhead considerations and large funding amounts. Though, in the current situation individual donations seem obviously better than nothing.

I donated $50k via Manifund because I think Lightcone is great and tends to have a harder time getting funding from the usual suspects. I do work at AIFP, and we’ve been working with Lightcone on some new projects, but this donation is not a payment and is not tied to my role at AIFP or our working relationship. Obviously, working with Lightcone has made me think more positively about them, which likely influenced my decision to give this grant. That said, the donation is in my capacity as a Manifund regrantor and long-time admirer of what they do.

I think Lighthaven is very special, and I want Lightcone to have more capacity. I think they are amazing at web dev and want them to be able to help projects like AIFP (and others) with web stuff more than they currently can. I also really want them to have the space and freedom to do more creative, experimental things, like Inkhaven and hosting The Curve, and to run more programs and events in that spirit.

I think Lightcone is unusually well-positioned to try interesting things that others won’t, and I think that’s really good for the community. LessWrong is also great and important, but I’m honestly less worried about LessWrong going under if I don’t donate. What I want more from this is Lightcone being able to use the money to try new, creative projects that have trickle-down benefits for the rest of the ecosystem.

With that said, Lightcone is my clear number one. I think they are doing great work, both in terms of LessWrong and also Lighthaven. There is the potential, with greater funding, to enrich both of these tasks, and also for expansion.

There is a large force multiplier here (although that is true of a number of other organizations I list as well).

They made their 2024 fundraising pitch here, I encourage reading it.

Where I am beyond confident is that if LessWrong, the Alignment Forum or the venue Lighthaven were unable to continue, any one of these would be a major, quite bad unforced error.

LessWrong and the Alignment Forum a central part of the infrastructure of the meaningful internet.

Lighthaven is miles and miles away the best event venue I have ever seen. I do not know how to convey how much the design contributes to having a valuable conference, designed to facilitate the best kinds of conversations via a wide array of nooks and pathways designed with the principles of Christopher Alexander. This contributes to and takes advantage of the consistently fantastic set of people I encounter there.

The marginal costs here are large (~$3 million per year, some of which is made up by venue revenue), but the impact here is many times that, and I believe they can take on more than ten times that amount and generate excellent returns.

If we can go beyond short term funding needs, they can pay off the mortgage to secure a buffer, and buy up surrounding buildings to secure against neighbors (who can, given this is Berkeley, cause a lot of trouble) and to secure more housing and other space. This would secure the future of the space.

I would love to see them then expand into additional spaces. They note this would also require the right people.

Donate through every.org, or contact team@lesswrong.com.

I'm donating at least $10k (via Manifund).

I think Lightcone has been hugely impactful (see the above, which I think is very compelling evidence of a large amount of impact), and can't get funded from many of the usual places.

COI Note: Lightcone contracted with AI Futures Project (the org I work for) on AI 2027, and is continuing to contract with us on followup work. This is a donation for general support, and not anything like payment for services received.

Lightcone runs LessWrong and an office that Lightcone calls “Bell Labs for longtermism”.

Lightcone has a detailed case for impact on Manifund. In short, Lightcone maintains LessWrong, and LessWrong is upstream of a large quantity of AI safety work.

I believe Lightcone has high expected value and it can make good use of marginal donations.

By maintaining LessWrong, Lightcone somewhat improves many AI safety efforts (plus efforts on other beneficial projects that don’t relate to AI safety). If I were very uncertain about what sort of work was best, I might donate to Lightcone as a way to provide diffuse benefits across many areas. But since I believe (a specific sort of) policy work has much higher EV than AI safety research, I believe it makes more sense to fund that policy work directly.

An illustration with some made-up numbers: Suppose that

• There are 10 categories of AI safety work.
• Lightcone makes each of them 20% better.
• The average AI safety work produces 1 utility point.
• Well-directed AI policy produces 5 utility points.

Then a donation to Lightcone is worth 2 utility points, and my favorite AI policy orgs are worth 5 points. So a donation to Lightcone is better than the average AI safety org, but not as good as good policy orgs.

I'm not sure how I feel about Lightcone as an impactful donation opportunity on the margin, but I have personally benefitted a fair bit from Lightcone's work and broadly consider it to be high quality, so feel like it's in the spirit of EACC to donate!