(The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser

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 (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser 

 by habryka 30th Nov 2024 50 min read 273 612

 Update Jan 19th 2025: The Fundraiser is over! We had raised over $2.1M when the fundraiser closed, and have a few more irons in the fire that I expect will get us another $100k-$200k. This is short of our $3M goal, which I think means we will have some difficulties in the coming year, but is over our $2M goal which if we hadn't met it probably meant we would stop existing or have to make very extensive cuts. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, seeing so many people give so much has been very heartening. 

 TLDR: LessWrong + Lighthaven need about $3M for the next 12 months. Donate or send me an email , DM , signal message (+1 510 944 3235), or public comment on this post, if you want to support what we do. We are a registered 501(c)3, have big plans for the next year, and due to a shifting funding landscape need support from a broader community more than in any previous year.  [1]  

 I've been running LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure for the last 7 years. During that time we have grown into the primary infrastructure provider for the rationality and AI safety communities. "Infrastructure" is a big fuzzy word, but in our case, it concretely means: 

 We build and run LessWrong.com and the AI Alignment Forum. [2] 
 We built and run Lighthaven ( lighthaven.space ), a ~30,000 sq. ft. campus in downtown Berkeley where we host conferences, research scholars, and various programs dedicated to making humanity's future go better.
 We are active leaders of the rationality and AI safety communities, running conferences and retreats, participating in discussion on various community issues, noticing and trying to fix bad incentives, building grantmaking infrastructure , talking to people who want to get involved, and lots of other things.
 In general, Lightcone considers itself responsible for the end-to-end effectiveness of the extended rationality and AI safety community. If there is some kind of coordination failure, or part of the engine of impact that is missing, I aim for Lightcone to be an organization that can jump in and fix that, whatever it is. 

 Doing that requires a non-trivial amount of financial capital. For the next 12 months, we expect to spend around $3M, and in subsequent years around $2M (though we have lots of opportunities to scale up if we can get more funding for it). We currently have around $200k in the bank. [3] 

 Lightcone is, as far as I can tell, considered cost-effective by the large majority of people who have thought seriously about how to reduce existential risk and have considered Lightcone as a donation 

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