“Three things that surprised me about technical grantmaking at Coefficient Giving (fka Open Phil)” by null

“Three things that surprised me about technical grantmaking at Coefficient Giving (fka Open Phil)” by null

Author: LessWrong December 4, 2025 Duration: 9:45
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
TechnologyCulturePhilosophySocietySociety & Culture
Open Philanthropy's Coefficient Giving's Technical AI Safety team is hiring grantmakers. I thought this would be a good moment to share some positive updates about the role that I’ve made since I joined the team a year ago.

tl;dr: I think this role is more impactful and more enjoyable than I anticipated when I started, and I think more people should consider applying.

It's not about the “marginal” grants

Some people think that being a grantmaker at Coefficient means sorting through a big pile of grant proposals and deciding which ones to say yes and no to. As a result, they think that the only impact at stake is how good our decisions are about marginal grants, since all the excellent grants are no-brainers.

But grantmakers don’t just evaluate proposals; we elicit them. I spend the majority of my time trying to figure out how to get better proposals into our pipeline: writing RFPs that describe the research projects we want to fund, or pitching promising researchers on AI safety research agendas, or steering applicants to better-targeted or more ambitious proposals.

Maybe more importantly, cG's technical AI safety grantmaking strategy is currently underdeveloped, and even junior grantmakers can help [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) It's not about the marginal grants

(03:03) There is no counterfactual grantmaker

(05:15) Grantmaking is more fun/motivating than I anticipated

(08:35) Please apply!

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First published:
November 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gLt7KJkhiEDwoPkae/three-things-that-surprised-me-about-technical-grantmaking

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