As I was looking through possible donation opportunities, I noticed that MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser has a total of only $547,024 at the moment of writing (out of the target $6M, and stretch target of $10M). Their fundraising will stop at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. At their current rate they will definitely not come anywhere close to their target, though it seems likely to me that donations will become more frequent towards the end of the year. Anyone know why they currently seem to struggle to get close to their target?
As of now they basically got $273k if you ignore the matching for a moment. I am not quite sure why people at MIRI aren’t trying a little harder on different platforms or more people aren’t speaking on this. At the current pace they will likely only get a fraction of even the matching amount of 1.6 million. (Naively extrapolated they will have $368k EOD December 31st.)
I posted the MIRI fundraiser on twitter because of this today but this seems borderline catastrophic like they will lose 1.2 Million of the matching grant or more. (I also donated about $1k today)
It’s indeed odd that they aren’t promoting this more. My guess was that maybe they have potential funders willing to step in if the fundraiser doesn’t work? Pure speculation, of course.
The first $1.6M will be matched 1:1 by Survival and Flourishing Fund. It seems plausible that donations right now could actually cause counterfactual matching, which is good if you think MIRI is better than whatever SFF otherwise would have funded.
It seems plausible that donations right now could actually cause counterfactual matching
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
These matching funds are intended to be counterfactual, and I think they are pretty counterfactual.
If MIRI don’t fundraise to match the SFF matching dollars, the the SFF matching dollars set aside for MIRI is just returned to Jaan.
There’s a more complicated question about how much SFF would have donated to MIRI if MIRI had not requested matching funds. My personal guess is “less, but not a lot less”, for this round (though this will probably be different in future rounds—SFF, as an institution, wants to set up a system that rewards applicants for asking for matching funds, because that allows it to partially defer to the judgement of other funders, and to invest in a stronger more diversified funding ecosystem.)
Also, I think that the negative signal of people being uninterested in supporting MIRI will tend to make SFF less enthusiastic about granting to MIRI in the future, though the size of that effect is unclear.
Yeah, all I meant was that it seems like MIRI is not that close to reaching $1.6 million in donations. If they were going to make $1.6 million anyway, then a marginal donation would not cause SFF to donate more
Does SSD have fixed or flexible budget? It could be that the bottleneck to Jaan Tallinn’s spending is rather how many good options there will be to donate to, rather than his budget.
Flexible. When an S-process round starts, there’s an estimate about how much will be allocated in total, but funders (usually Jaan, sometimes others), might ultimately decide to give more or less, depending on both the quality of the applications and the quality of the analysis by the recommenders in the S-process.
As I was looking through possible donation opportunities, I noticed that MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser has a total of only $547,024 at the moment of writing (out of the target $6M, and stretch target of $10M). Their fundraising will stop at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. At their current rate they will definitely not come anywhere close to their target, though it seems likely to me that donations will become more frequent towards the end of the year. Anyone know why they currently seem to struggle to get close to their target?
As of now they basically got $273k if you ignore the matching for a moment. I am not quite sure why people at MIRI aren’t trying a little harder on different platforms or more people aren’t speaking on this. At the current pace they will likely only get a fraction of even the matching amount of 1.6 million. (Naively extrapolated they will have $368k EOD December 31st.)
I posted the MIRI fundraiser on twitter because of this today but this seems borderline catastrophic like they will lose 1.2 Million of the matching grant or more. (I also donated about $1k today)
It’s indeed odd that they aren’t promoting this more. My guess was that maybe they have potential funders willing to step in if the fundraiser doesn’t work? Pure speculation, of course.
The first $1.6M will be matched 1:1 by Survival and Flourishing Fund. It seems plausible that donations right now could actually cause counterfactual matching, which is good if you think MIRI is better than whatever SFF otherwise would have funded.
I work part time for SFF.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
These matching funds are intended to be counterfactual, and I think they are pretty counterfactual.
If MIRI don’t fundraise to match the SFF matching dollars, the the SFF matching dollars set aside for MIRI is just returned to Jaan.
There’s a more complicated question about how much SFF would have donated to MIRI if MIRI had not requested matching funds. My personal guess is “less, but not a lot less”, for this round (though this will probably be different in future rounds—SFF, as an institution, wants to set up a system that rewards applicants for asking for matching funds, because that allows it to partially defer to the judgement of other funders, and to invest in a stronger more diversified funding ecosystem.)
Also, I think that the negative signal of people being uninterested in supporting MIRI will tend to make SFF less enthusiastic about granting to MIRI in the future, though the size of that effect is unclear.
Yeah, all I meant was that it seems like MIRI is not that close to reaching $1.6 million in donations. If they were going to make $1.6 million anyway, then a marginal donation would not cause SFF to donate more
Looks like you cut off a part of the sentence.
Thanks, fixed.
Does SSD have fixed or flexible budget? It could be that the bottleneck to Jaan Tallinn’s spending is rather how many good options there will be to donate to, rather than his budget.
What’s SSD?
I meant SFF. No idea what was up with my typing circuits.
Flexible. When an S-process round starts, there’s an estimate about how much will be allocated in total, but funders (usually Jaan, sometimes others), might ultimately decide to give more or less, depending on both the quality of the applications and the quality of the analysis by the recommenders in the S-process.