EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

The current Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) fund managers and I have decided to step back from our work on the LTFF. Because we believe LTFF donors trusted the fund managers to ensure that the funds would be used in line with the purposes of their donation, we've decided the right move is to close the fund.

While LTFF is closing, note that EA Funds has launched a new fund, called the Transformative AI Fund (TAIF), with a large overlap in scope, funding early-stage projects that reduce risks from powerful AI systems, led by Lowe Lundin. It is open for applications and donations now. Some LTFF Fund managers plan to continue part-time grantmaking via the AI Risk Mitigation Fund and Lightcone Commons.

LTFF fund managers have discussed what to do with the remaining balance of the LTFF. We see our duty to LTFF donors as maximising the expected impact of the money they entrusted to us, within the scope of the fund. Closing a fund involves trade-offs in how to honour that.

With that in mind, we have decided to transfer the remaining balance to [new fund], structured as follows:

Up to three-quarters will be distributed under the direct [...]

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Outline:

(02:04) Why are we moving on from the LTFF?

(03:06) Situational Awareness and Quickly Reorienting

(04:51) Competing Opportunities

(05:18) Institutional Friction

(06:27) Why Is EA Funds Starting a New Fund Making AI Safety Grants?

(07:00) What will happen with remaining funds?

(08:20) Why Lightcone Commons?

(10:15) Why Support the New CEA AI Focussed Fund?

(11:04) What do existing LTFF applicants need to do?

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TL;DR

NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.

We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Preliminary results are expected in October 2026. The end-line analysis is run by IPA and our academic partners, not by NOVAH.

Edutainment to prevent intimate partner violence is promising, but it is still young as a field. We do not want to spend donor money scaling it unless the evidence shows it works at least as well as the strongest existing approaches. The RCT is what will tell us that. Therefore, before seeing those results, we want to make our decision rule public:

We will scale our programming only if the RCT finds a statistically significant relative reduction of at least 5% in physical or sexual intimate partner violence prevalence. How quickly we proceed will depend on the size and certainty of the effect.

Our current [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) TL;DR

(02:04) Background on NOVAH's cause area and intervention

(04:03) How we are evaluating our impact

(05:54) Our pre-commitment

(07:10) What happens under each result?

(07:14) Effect below 5%, or not statistically significant: pause and explore

(07:47) Effect of 5%-20%: continue as planned

(08:15) Effect above 20%: accelerate

(08:33) Why did you choose a 5% reduction?

(09:37) Is everything driven by this RCT?

(10:55) Why make this public?

(11:29) How you can hold us to this

(12:00) Should more non-profits do this?

(12:37) Final words

(13:09) Learn more and get in touch

(13:41) Appendix

(13:47) Why do you use IPV-year instead of DALYs in your cost-effectiveness?

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• A lot of scientific evidence has been gestured at to show how wide an organism's welfare range (i.e., the absolute intensity at the end of the affective spectrum) might be. But most (if not all) of this evidence is in fact evidence of evaluative acuity (i.e., how many differentiable gradients of pain and pleasure the spectrum contains). (§2)
• In theory, a cognitively simple organism could feel either nothing or something extreme, and nothing in between. And a complex one could dissociate between trillions of different pain levels between nothing and a pinprick, and never feel anything worse. Acuity and range can be independent. (§1)
• In practice, there may be evolutionary reasons to expect some dependence, but this does not tell us how strong it would be or what the dependence relationship looks like. This is in tension with what many arguments for prioritizing some species over others have implicitly assumed so far—I’m talking about both arguments for prioritizing less numerous cognitively complex beings over many simpler ones, and arguments for the exact opposite. Call this the acuity problem. (§3)
• The consequence is that the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the moral weights we should assign to different species is even [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) Summary

(02:06) 1. Acuity vs Range

(04:00) 2. Purported evidence for cross-species varying degrees of sentience is evidence for varying acuity

(07:19) 3. How dependent are acuity and range?

(10:52) 4. The resulting deep uncertainty and its implications

(14:19) Acknowledgements

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TL;DR

• The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
• The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital sentience, though we expect these to be a small minority of grants. For now, biosecurity and nuclear will only be supported at the AI intersection.
• The fund will provide funding that is early-stage, fast, and tolerant of failure, to build the field's absorptive capacity. We're betting that a lot of philanthropic money is about to arrive, and that the field doesn't have enough organizations to put it to work.
• We aim to always be open to applications, respond quickly and reliably, and publish quarterly reports on what we fund and why.
• Whether you're an individual, a new organization, or an existing organization with a new idea, you can apply here.
• We’re actively fundraising. We have a seed grant of ~1 million dollars, but hope to raise significantly more, as we believe there are sufficient opportunities in the field to [...]

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Outline:

(01:49) Background

(02:54) Purpose

(06:50) Focus areas

(07:50) Team

(09:44) Fund principles

(09:47) Early-stage funding

(10:36) Transparent by default

(11:25) Open applications with quick, reliable responses

(12:44) Why give to the Transformative AI Fund?

(12:49) Why give through a fund?

(14:21) Why this fund?

(15:02) How to get involved

(15:05) If you're a donor

(15:36) If you're starting something new

(15:50) If you're interested in working with us

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Priority deadline: October 15, 2026. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and we encourage earlier submission for time-sensitive work. Apply here.

Summary

The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) is seeking proposals that accelerate the cage-free transition for laying hens at scale, especially in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (although we are open to applications from other regions, too). The majority of the world's laying hens are still confined in barren battery cages, and the fastest growth in egg production is in the Global South, where cage-free markets are least developed. Corporate cage-free commitments now cover a meaningful share of egg supply in many countries, but a commitment converts to animal impact only when three things are in place: accountability that holds companies to their word, supply-side capacity that makes cage-free eggs available to buy, and a local enabling environment of clear cage-free standards.

AWF funds the entire pipeline of cage-free transitions—from corporate commitments, to accountability campaigns, to producer technical support, to supply chain innovation, to mandatory labelling policy, to cage egg policy bans. In 2026, we plan to deploy 15 million dollars+ towards a cage-free future for laying hens.

This request for proposals is an open application. After [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) Summary

(01:45) What we are funding

(01:49) Cage-free technical implementation, Global South

(03:41) Cage-free corporate campaigns and accountability, Global South

(05:26) Cage-free legislation and accountability, EU

(06:37) Lower priority interventions

(07:05) Grant sizes and duration

(07:55) What we will not fund

(08:22) How we evaluate

(08:52) Eligibility

(09:32) How and when to apply

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Linkpost for my Substack piece, lightly adapted.

Donors are holding AI wealth at enormous risk. Their giving is often extremely risk-averse.

“What is the most common mistake donors make?”

This is one of the questions I get asked most as a donation adviser. Often, I say that it's risk tolerance.

Many donors have risk backwards. They hold the money they plan to give at close to maximum risk, often in a single company's stock, then give it away at close to minimum risk, backing only the most heavily evidenced organisations.

Getting it the right way round means working at three levels: de-risk the wealth that funds your giving, diversify your grant portfolio, and take more risk inside it.

What do most donors get wrong about risk?

Candidly - almost everything. The majority of individual donors are distributing risk carelessly across multiple axes.

Take the distribution of risk between wealth and grantmaking, for example. Many donors are taking extremely large risks with their capital, whilst only giving to massive organisations backed by 24 randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

That's two risk decisions taken with the same money, sometimes without noticing either.

AI equity holders are a clear case. Many [...]

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Outline:

(01:04) What do most donors get wrong about risk?

(02:10) How much risk should I take with my charitable giving?

(05:25) How should I spread risk across my giving?

(08:53) How should I balance evidence and risk in my donations?

(11:16) Do charities need RCTs before I fund them?

(13:11) I'm expecting an AI windfall. What should I do?

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Last year, around 100 pro-animal voters came to the UK Parliament for a mass lobby day, run by UK Voters for Animals, to call for an end to cages and crates for farmed animals. This was the first time many of these people had engaged with political advocacy, and together we had over 30 meetings with MPs and their teams about ending cages and crates for farmed animals. (Since then, the UK Government has run a consultation on phasing out cages for layer hens, thanks to the efforts of many dedicated groups and volunteers over time).

With a bit more experience under our belts, we're organising another Mass Lobby Day in Parliament on Tuesday, the 10th of November, and we need YOU to join us.

This time, we take on Frankenchickens: fast-growing chickens that are bred to grow 400% faster than is natural, reaching slaughter weight in as little as 35 days. Their bodies cannot keep up with their own growth. They suffer chronic lameness, heart and lung failure, and hock burns from lying in their own waste, often too heavy to stand. Many suffer from the day they hatch to the day they are [...]

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I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you're doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.

I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and misleading. I'll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings.

As you may know, I'm not anti-AI. I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts. I also think using AI for line and copy editing, or [...]

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Outline:

(02:10) The Writing Process Is the Thinking Process

(04:57) AI Writing Is Vague and Wrong in Hard-to-Notice Ways

(12:43) Writing with AI (and Not Labeling It as Such) Is Rude and Misleading

(15:12) Aren't There Exceptions?

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Subtitle: Sometimes the easily defended view is the one you really want

The most striking thing about effective altruism, dialectically, is that it's a neglected truism:

Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it's worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good as one among one's many life projects.

Most people do not, in fact, adopt the efficient promotion of the impartial good as even one among their many life projects. That's a shame! I think more people should try this, and I take encouraging this change to be a constitutive aim of the EA movement (along with helping those attempting this project to pursue it more effectively).

Those who don’t like this idea generally don’t reject it explicitly. Nobody says, “As one of the wealthiest people in history, I would really much prefer to keep over 90% of my income for personal consumption, get moral kudos for purely symbolic acts, and not have to think at all about the interests of emotionally unappealing moral patients like shrimp or distant future generations.” But nor will they endorse the moderate EA ask. [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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Hi everyone. I lead marketing and communications at CEA. Given the amount of attention we expect The Altruists series to generate, I'm posting a high-level update and introducing myself as a point of contact for questions or coordination.

Later this year, Netflix is expected to release The Altruists, an eight-episode crime drama series telling the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the collapse of FTX. It's produced by Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas' production company) and stars Anthony Boyle as Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner as Ellison.

We don't have advance information about how EA will be portrayed, or how much the series will engage with EA beyond the FTX connection. We’re following developments as they emerge.

We think it's likely the series will draw a large audience (for comparison, Higher Ground's Inventing Anna amassed 1.2 billion viewing minutes in its first three days) and generate significant media coverage. If that proves correct, we'd expect more people to hear about effective altruism for the first time (for context, Rethink Priorities estimates genuine EA awareness among US adults to be roughly 1-3%). We see our job as making sure accurate and up-to-date information is easy to find when people search [...]

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