“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn

“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn

Author: LessWrong December 13, 2025 Duration: 4:54
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 [...]

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First published:
December 9th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JtFnkoSmJ7b6Tj3TK/the-funding-conversation-we-left-unfinished

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Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Podcast Episodes
"Deep learning as program synthesis" by Zach Furman [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:42
Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Epistemic status: This post is a synthesis of idea…
"Why I Transitioned: A Response" by marisa [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:17
Fiora Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned: A Case Study (the OP) articulates a valuable theory for why some MtFs transition. If you are MtF and feel the post describes you, I believe you. However, many statements from th…
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Duration: 11:56
Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here. We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holi…
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Duration: 14:16
I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings. Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is…
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On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. This is what it thought: Pardon? Th…
"On Owning Galaxies" by Simon Lermen [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:37
It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander a…