“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
"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 15:53
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. I am here to give you more objectionable adv…
"How to game the METR plot" by shash42 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 12:05
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometime…
"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:55
A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even r…
"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by Raemon [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:04
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and…
“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by Julian Bradshaw [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:41
Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly anno…