The funding conversation we left unfinished

The funding conversation we left unfinished — EA Forum 
 
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 by jenn Dec 10 2025 3 min read 53 211

 Community Building effective altruism Effective altruism funding Frontpage People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year ). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for their own personal donations and for the ecosystem , and this is encouraging to see.

 It also has me thinking about 2022. Immediately before the FTX collapse, we were just starting to reckon, as a community, with the pretty significant vibe shift in EA that came from having a lot more money to throw around.

 CitizenTen, in " The Vultures Are Circling " (April 2022), puts it this way:

 The message is out. There’s easy money to be had. And the vultures are coming. On many internet circles, there’s been a worrying tone. “You should apply for [insert EA grant], all I had to do was pretend to care about x, and I got $$!” Or, “I’m not even an EA, but I can pretend, as getting a 10k grant is a good instrumental goal towards [insert-poor-life-goals-here]” Or, “Did you hear that a 16 year old got x amount of money? That’s ridiculous! I thought EA’s were supposed to be effective!” Or, “All you have to do is mouth the words community building and you get thrown bags of money.” 

 Basically, the sharp increase in rewards has led the number of people who are optimizing for the wrong thing to go up. Hello Goodhart . Instead of the intrinsically motivated EA, we’re beginning to get the resume padders, the career optimizers, and the type of person that cheats on the entry test for preschool in the hopes of getting their child into a better college. I’ve already heard of discord servers springing up centered around gaming the admission process for grants. And it’s not without reason. The Atlas Fellowship is offering a 50k, no strings attached scholarship. If you want people to throw out any hesitation around cheating the system, having a carrot that’s larger than most adult’s yearly income will do that.

 Other highly upvoted posts from that era:

 I feel anxious that there is all this money around. Let's talk about it - Nathan Young, March 2022
 Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics - George Rosenfield, April 2022
 EA and the current funding situation - Will MacAskill, May 2022
 The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift - Ben Kuhn, May 2022
 Bad Omens in Current Community Building - Theo Hawking, May 2022
 The EA movement’s values are drifting.

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