Budget: We run at ~$13m p.a. rn (~$15m for the next year under modest growth assumptions, quite plausibly $17m++ given the increasingly insane ML job market).
Audacious funding: This ended up being a bit under $16m, and is a commitment across 3 years.
Runway: Depending on spend/growth assumptions, we have between 12 and 16 months of runway. We want to grow at the higher rate, but we might end up bottlenecked on senior hiring. (But that’s potentially a problem you can spend money to solve—and it also helps to be able to say “we have funding security and we have budget for you to build out a new team”).
More context on our thinking: The audacious funding was a one-off, and we need to make sure we have a sustainable funding model. My sense is that for “normal” nonprofits, raising >$10m/yr is considered a big lift that would involve multiple FT fundraisers and a large fraction of org leadership’s time, and even then not necessarily succeed. We have the hypothesis that the AI safety ecosystem can support this level of funding (and more specifically, that funding availability will scale up in parallel with the growth of AI sector in general), but we want to get some evidence that that’s right and build up reasonable runway before we bet too aggressively on it. Our fundraising goal for the end of 2025 is to raise $10M
Can you say anything about what METR’s annual budget/runway is? Given that you raised $17mn a year ago, I would have expected METR to be well funded
Budget: We run at ~$13m p.a. rn (~$15m for the next year under modest growth assumptions, quite plausibly $17m++ given the increasingly insane ML job market).
Audacious funding: This ended up being a bit under $16m, and is a commitment across 3 years.
Runway: Depending on spend/growth assumptions, we have between 12 and 16 months of runway. We want to grow at the higher rate, but we might end up bottlenecked on senior hiring. (But that’s potentially a problem you can spend money to solve—and it also helps to be able to say “we have funding security and we have budget for you to build out a new team”).
More context on our thinking: The audacious funding was a one-off, and we need to make sure we have a sustainable funding model. My sense is that for “normal” nonprofits, raising >$10m/yr is considered a big lift that would involve multiple FT fundraisers and a large fraction of org leadership’s time, and even then not necessarily succeed. We have the hypothesis that the AI safety ecosystem can support this level of funding (and more specifically, that funding availability will scale up in parallel with the growth of AI sector in general), but we want to get some evidence that that’s right and build up reasonable runway before we bet too aggressively on it. Our fundraising goal for the end of 2025 is to raise $10M
That seems reasonable, thanks a lot for all the detail and context!