Funding Type: Grants

Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative — Algorithmic Alignment Group

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $30,000 over three years to the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative to support the Algorithmic Alignment Group (AAG). Led by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, AAG researches how humans and AI systems interact in the contexts of value learning, incentives, recommendation, debugging, and policy.

This follows our March 2024 support and falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

Innovate Animal Ag — Farm Animal Welfare Technology Adoption (2024)

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $650,000 over two years to Innovate Animal Ag to support its work to facilitate the adoption of new technology that improves farm animal welfare. Innovate Animal Ag will continue to focus on helping companies implement in-ovo egg sexing, which prevents the culling of male chicks in the egg industry.

This follows our September 2023 support and falls within our focus area of farm animal welfare.

The Centre for Long-Term Resilience — General Support

Image courtesy of the Centre for Long-Term Resilience

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of £4,000,000 (approximately $5,119,246 at the time of conversion) over three years to The Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR) for general support. We will also match CLTR’s fundraising 1:1, up to an additional £3,000,000 (approximately $4,003,800). CLTR is an independent think tank focused on transforming global resilience to extreme risks. 

This falls within our focus areas of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.

Swift Centre — Forecasting Workshops

Image courtesy of the Swift Centre

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $200,000 to the Swift Centre to support a series of forecasting workshops for policymakers in the UK and produce a publicly available report based on the content covered in the workshops.

This falls within our focus area of forecasting.

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine — Snakebite Therapies

Image courtesy of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of £4,177,873 (approximately $5,473,069 at the time of conversion) over five years to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to support a Phase II clinical trial investigating the potential of two oral drugs, unithiol and marimastat, to act as new therapies against bites from the common lancehead (Brazil) and the West African carpet viper (Ghana).

Bites from these snakes are potentially fatal, and require urgent treatment. If successful, both drugs would represent inexpensive treatments that could be deployed in rural settings.  

This falls within our focus area of global health R&D.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine — Anemia RCT

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of £3,528,351 (approximately $4,551,974 at the time of conversion) over four years to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to support a randomized controlled trial in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Tanzania to evaluate the effectiveness of tranexamic acid, a generic drug, in treating anemia. For more information on the trial, please visit the relevant clinicaltrials.gov page.

This falls within our focus area of global health R&D.

Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group — Interpretability Work

Image courtesy of the Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $737,000 over two years to the Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group to support work led by Atticus Geiger to conduct interpretability research, create open-source course materials on mechanistic interpretability, and run a mentorship program.

This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.