EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Please spend <5 minutes filling in the below polls on AI alignment!

Thank you to everyone who filled out last month's polls. It was great to see 60+ comments engaging with these issues.

This month's survey has already been taken by a panel of 15 alignment researchers, including Scott Alexander (ACX), David Manheim (ALTER), Jeff Sebo (NYU), and Tobias Baumann (CRS). We'll compare panel and community responses in an upcoming report, which we'll publish here and on LessWrong. To get notified when it's released, you can subscribe to our new Substack.

Many people we've talked to have very different intuitions about where the alignment community stands on the below issues. We hope that your responses to these polls, and the resulting report, will help map core areas of (dis)agreement within the field, and ground CaML's research agenda.

A few final things about the polls themselves:

• Timeframe: unless a statement says otherwise (e.g. post-AGI), read forward-looking claims as being about roughly the next 2 years.
• We're not trying to find the 'right' answers. Please answer based on your own best guess.
• % agree is your % credence in a given position
• Please let us know if you think the [...]

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First published:

July 30th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5huXea9bB7mtMQbrX/community-polls-on-alignment-controversies-ii-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR

Most urban animals, especially those other than cats and dogs, are highly neglected, even though probably tens of billions of them live in urban environments, and suffer from preventable harms. This post argues for a global nonprofit that would research the problem, test interventions and support local groups under the idea that cities are multispecies societies.

Despite major uncertainty about scale and expected value, this could directly help many urban animals and potentially have strong flow through effects: urban animals could serve as a bridge for empathy toward all animals, support wild animal welfare research, and bring new people and funding into the movement.

In my view, a nonprofit dedicated specifically to urban animal welfare, compared with programs run by organizations with a broader focus that work on animals both in nature and in cities, could better address the distinct challenges of urban environments, avoid some of the philosophical controversy surrounding interventions in nature, and attract more funding and people, including from outside the traditional animal advocacy movement.

Thanks to @Ben Stevenson, @Max Taylor, Richard Parr and Noa Deutsch for helpful comments on this post. All mistakes are my own.

Epistemic Status

Very unsure about the numbers I [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) TLDR

(01:27) Epistemic Status

(01:48) What are Urban Animals

(02:54) What do Urban Animals Suffer From?

(04:34) Neglectedness

(05:39) Organizations Whose Work Includes Neglected Urban Animal Species

(07:38) Tractability

(10:35) Scale

(14:30) Reasons in Favor of This Idea

(18:18) Reasons Against This Idea

(19:21) What the Nonprofit Could Do

(21:28) Open Strategic Questions

(22:00) Conclusion

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First published:

August 2nd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/thEMWd6yA7kA2p4QE/urban-animals-deserve-a-global-nonprofit

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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And why our 2023 regrant to Timaeus was goated

We think the for-profit funding ecosystem has some cool properties. Different funders naturally come in at different stages, from angel investors who are good at spotting early opportunities to large funds who might invest in late-stage startups to public market traders. Funders race to back promising projects. And the more they get right, the more they’re rewarded with more money to invest in the future.

It would be great if more of those properties existed in nonprofit funding as well. We think that the flow from “person makes great early donation” → “person has more influence” is too weak. And as opposed to the VC world, where investors compete against each other to invest in something quickly, nonprofit funding is beset by “funder chicken,” in which a funder waits for other funders to fill an opportunity, each trying to preserve their capital. This makes fundraising a slog.

What if donating to nonprofits worked more like investing in companies? Impact markets have been talked about in EA for a while. At Manifund, we dream of bringing impact markets to the AI safety funding ecosystem. And at the very least, we want [...]

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Outline:

(01:28) Timaeus: a case study in charitable ROI

(03:44) Donate early, donate fast

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First published:

July 31st, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/v8W6SGxkvzP8Pzwy2/when-you-donate-can-matter-more-than-where

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: Applications are open for AIM's first ever animal-only incubation round. The program runs February 2027, and it is different from any round we've run before: we’ve rebuilt the research process with animal welfare in mind, recommending frontier problems rather than fully-scoped solutions, there is a new funded three-month exploration phase after the core program, and two weeks in San Francisco alongside the movement's biggest funders and thinkers. Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project) has joined to help design and run it. Applications close 13th September.

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A few months ago, we wrote about why now might be the best time ever to start an animal charity. In short: the bottlenecks that limited us to incubating roughly two to four animal charities a year are easing on both sides, us finding more superstar founders excited to work on animal welfare and mid-stage funding becoming less of a limiting factor than it was a few years ago. Meanwhile, the animal movement needs more new interventions and organizations in the pipeline so that efforts to fix factory farming can scale in the coming years. The low-hanging fruit hasn't been picked because barely anyone is in the orchard: Incubating more trailblazing [...]

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Outline:

(01:41) What's different about this round

(06:08) More on "frontier problems"

(07:42) The research process

(08:21) Illustrative examples we're excited about

(08:50) Welfare tech

(09:31) Enabling primary animal welfare research.

(10:14) Talent meta-charities.

(10:48) Neglected animal populations.

(11:19) You don't need to be an "animal person"

(11:41) Key dates and how to apply

(11:45) The animal round

(12:34) But what about other cause areas?

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

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First published:

August 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MsH3w5FdmEjr2aE7b/aim-s-first-ever-dedicated-animal-welfare-incubation-program

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Blogs have shaped our philosophical worldviews, found us careers and friends, and changed our lives. There's a good chance that a great blog of yore is the reason you’re reading this right now.

But many great bloggers have stopped blogging. The pile-on dynamics of the internet discourage unfiltered thoughts, and algorithmic feeds amplify ragebait and slop. Fear of scrutiny leads people to confine things to private Google docs and group chats. And good blogs are often victims of their own success — someone with a lot of good thoughts is at risk of becoming an adult with a demanding job and not that much free time.

It's not all bad. Substack has led to a renaissance of email newsletters, and our friends at Inkhaven host a bootcamp for bloggers. These are awesome, but they structurally encourage posting every day. We’d rather read the marginal post from an accomplished but erstwhile blogger, than one from a daily Substacker — even if the latter is a better writer!

So we’re launching the Blog Revival Project, to crowdfund $1,000+ bounties for good bloggers.

Sign up and pledge money towards reviving your favorite defunct blog! Or (though we kind of designed the website [...]

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Outline:

(02:06) FAQ

(03:29) FAQ for bloggers

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First published:

July 27th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dNG5MPjFiN86FN98d/blog-revival-project

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of grant programs, from small microgrants to regranting to ambitious new platforms to galaxy-brained schemes for impact markets. Here are five components that I think any grant program needs to be good:

1. Money

This one is obvious: a grant program needs money to give out.

Historically in EA and AI safety, this started as individual small donations from earning-to-give, to Dustin Moskovitz's money via Good Ventures, to an ill-fated boom around the FTX Future Fund, and now everyone preparing for the frothy Anthropic and OpenAI dollars.

2. Taste

This is also kind of obvious. Most people's image of “what makes a good grantmaker” is “excellent taste”, which is to say, the ability to discern between good or bad projects.

Grant taste comes in a few forms:

• Taste in people: founders of projects, leaders of orgs
• Taste in ideas: whether a particular idea might succeed; whether it’d be good if it did
• Taste in fields: cause prio across technical AI safety vs policy vs fieldbuilding

One problem with taste is that everyone invariably thinks that they have good taste. Also, there isn’t necessarily One True Taste, so it can [...]

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Outline:

(00:26) 1. Money

(00:50) 2. Taste

(01:59) 3. Dealflow

(03:07) 4. Hustle

(04:19) 5. Trust

(06:13) Breaking down some recent grant programs

(06:18) ACX Grants

(06:55) grantmaking.ai

(07:30) Lightcone Commons

(08:05) Coefficient Giving

(08:41) Can money buy taste/dealflow/hustle/trust?

(10:00) Appendix

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First published:

July 30th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NFsWzsZSZEPdthCqf/money-taste-dealflow-hustle-trust

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

It's my belief that the intersection of AI x Animals represents one of the most pressing current opportunities for the prevention of suffering.

It's also a very new area, with information spread across lots of locations, making it hard to get your bearings and know where to consider taking action.

To help with that this post includes:

• A literature review table summarising 96 papers, youtube videos, articles and other sources.  The table includes links to the papers, brief summaries of each, and is organised into sub-themes for navigation.
• A quadrant map and table visualising alignment and influence of various key orgs
• A network map visualising relationships between various key orgs

For Context

This post summarises the findings of a research project I completed in early-mid 2026 mapping the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Animal Welfare. I used AI to help with early drafting, but the current version is very much in my own voice and tone - as should be quite obvious from what my friends call my “unique” sense of humour.

I am treating this as a working document and welcome pushback, feedback, updates etc

Also, whilst the project was completed as part of an Effective Thesis Fellowship [...]

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Outline:

(00:56) For Context

(01:39) Key Takeaways

(03:27) Why This Intersection Deserves (More) Serious Attention

(05:51) The Research Process

(10:14) The Actor Landscape: Mapping Influence and Alignment

(10:58) "That Damned Diagonal"

(11:43) The Missing Middle

(12:16) The Anthropic Anomaly

(13:20) The Network of Influence

(14:00) Disconnected AI Safety and Animal Advocacy Orgs

(15:02) The Potential Utility of Bridge Nodes

(15:45) What the Literature Tells Us: Eight Sub-Domains

(27:51) The Structural Asymmetry: A Summary

(29:43) Where Do We Go From Here?

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

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First published:

July 30th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Zp5cFZF4CLQrGZHTg/i-spent-167-hours-mapping-the-aixanimals-ecosystem-so-you

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of the effective giving community as reported by Giving What We Can, make it difficult for even hardcore sceptics (and I probably count myself among this curmudgeonly crowd) to stick to the view that we are in business as usual.

There are many reasons to believe that this expected growth will happen, and I’d be remiss to not mention Nan Ransohoff's great piece on the matter. This article was a catalyst. Where before board members and execs who were particularly clued into the Bay area may have expected to see this change in the size of the giving market, Nan's piece gave this a name and salience. The third wave of philanthropy materialized slowly, and then all at once.

This possibility of increased funding has now taken the shape of a near certainty in some circles. Besides the perfunctory “it may not happen” at the end of a long pitch, it is not uncommon to sit in conversations that assume the existence of this funding, and [...]

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Outline:

(01:34) No such money

(03:11) Smaller amounts

(04:23) Absorption

(06:24) What next?

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First published:

July 29th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xNnafgb8BAkysaHsh/what-if-the-third-wave-is-a-puddle

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Executive Summary

Newborns born too small or too soon (vulnerable) account for 70% of the world's 2 million newborn deaths every year, despite representing just 15% of births. Kangaroo Care, a practice of skin to skin care and exclusive breastfeeding, is proven to reduce mortality among vulnerable newborns by a third compared to conventional care. Despite WHO recommendation, only 5% of eligible newborns receive it.
First Embrace was incubated in the Ambitious Impact program in late 2025 to minimise newborn deaths by scaling Kangaroo Care. One in every ten newborn deaths is in Nigeria, where we work.

In our first year we evaluated two key questions:

1. Can we cost-effectively deliver Kangaroo Care in a high-burden Nigerian public hospital?
2. Can government partnership provide evidence of a path from policy on paper to implementation at scale?
    

ReachWe have been delivering Kangaroo Care at our pilot hospital since February 2026. By June we enrolled 320 newborns and delivered Kangaroo Care to 301 of them.ImpactWe conservatively estimate that our program counterfactually saves 43 lives per year for $4,378 per life saved. At regional scale we estimate this drops to $3,711.
During the pilot our program saved 14 lives. 

GiveWell estimates the [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Executive Summary

(02:31) 1. The Problem

(03:23) 2. The Solution

(05:40) 3. Our Approach

(07:31) 4. Results

(07:52) 4.1. Baseline Neonatal Mortality

(09:25) 4.2. Outcome

(11:39) 4.3. Cost-effectiveness

(13:43) 5. Implementation Lessons

(15:14) 6. Plans

(15:17) Improvement

(18:31) Evaluation

(19:12) Partnerships

(19:37) 7. Team

(20:27) 8. Funding

(21:04) Thank you

(21:34) Appendix A: Implementation model in detail

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First published:

July 29th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wGXCuedzsubqNDAca/introducing-first-embrace-an-ambitious-impact-incubated

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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As you might know, we’ve recently launched the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF), a pooled fund that allocates donations across high-impact giving opportunities in Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. Thanks to generous donors and supporters, we have now completed our first distribution round, allocating more than $700,000 across the funds in our model, following its current recommended split.

A quick recap 

The CCF exists because cross-cause prioritization - comparing giving opportunities across different causes on a single scale - remains underdeveloped in effective giving. Rather than dividing funding by cause area first and optimizing within each one separately, the CCF uses an explicit model to evaluate specific funds directly against one another, so that a marginal dollar goes where it is likely to do the most good, all things considered, regardless of cause area. For the full rationale behind the fund, please read our launch announcement.

Our first distribution

In the first round, we distributed more than $700,000 across the funds included in our model, following the current recommended allocation that you can follow on our website. The table below shows how this round's distribution broke down by fund:

We are grateful to the [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) A quick recap

(01:15) Our first distribution

(01:56) How have we made this decision

(04:21) Work in progress

(05:07) Contribute to the CCF

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First published:

July 29th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HXYdhSzmxBTCEmtCi/cross-cause-fund-our-first-distribution-round

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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