Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $50,000 to The Breakthrough Institute to support the 2025 Abundance Conference, a gathering focused on advancing solutions to scarcity challenges in areas such as housing, innovation, and infrastructure.
This grant was made through our Abundance & Growth Fund.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $75,000 to DesegregateCT to support the 2024 national “Yes In My Backyard” conference. We have previously supported national YIMBY conferences held in 2016 in Boulder, Colorado; in 2017 in Oakland, California; in 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts; in 2022 in Portland, Oregon; and in 2024 in Austin, Texas.
This follows our September 2024 support and was made through our Abundance & Growth Fund.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,500,000 over three years to the University of California, San Francisco, to support a collaboration between Shawn Douglas and Bret Victor to develop practical scientific applications and use cases for Dynamicland, a computational framework made by Victor.
This grant was made through our Abundance & Growth Fund.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of £114,504 (approximately $140,382 at the time of conversion) to ML4Good to support in-person AI safety bootcamps intended to help early-career professionals develop skills related to machine learning and AI alignment.
This follows our May 2024 support and falls within our focus area of Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building.
Open Philanthropy recommended two grants totaling $2,995,207 to GovAI for general support. GovAI conducts research on AI governance and helps build the AI governance research community.
This follows our November 2024 support and falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
Open Philanthropy recommended a gift of $615,000 over two years to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to support research led by Professor Daniel Kang on using zero-knowledge proofs for third-party AI model evaluations.
Using zero-knowledge proofs during third-party evals could allow both the AI model provider and third party to verify information about the model without revealing model weights.
This grant was funded via a request for proposals for projects related to the responsible governance of AI. This follows our December 2024 support, and falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
Open Philanthropy recommended a gift of $100,796 over two years to Project Unleaded, based at the Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health, to support research led by Dr. Jenna Forsyth to develop and demonstrate a new reference method for measuring lead in paint, using portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) devices. We’re also supporting this project with grants to Mercer University and the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.
This falls within our focus area of global public health policy.
Open Philanthropy recommended a gift of $550,000 to UC Berkeley to support work led by Professor Amy Pickering to develop and evaluate low-cost in-line water chlorination devices. Such devices could improve drinking water quality in low-resource settings and lessen the burden of diarrheal disease. This grant was originally funded by the National Institutes of Health, but was recently canceled.
This follows our December 2021 support and falls within our work on scientific research, specifically within our interest in advancing human health and wellbeing.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $563,248 over two years to the Children’s National Research Institute to support a project to refine an AI-powered algorithm used to diagnose rheumatic heart disease (RHD) with a portable ultrasound device. The current algorithm is unable to diagnose cases driven by aortic valve regurgitation, which is thought to be around 15% of all RHD cases.
This falls within our focus area of global health R&D.
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $356,000 to FutureSearch to support research on automating the generation of forecasting questions. Generating forecasting questions is a key bottleneck to the wider adoption of forecasting tools. The results of the project will be made freely available to the public.
This falls within our focus area of forecasting.