EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

A few months ago I was talking to a software engineer at Google. On paper, a dream job. But she was frustrated. She felt like she wasn't contributing enough to the world and was seriously considering putting her engineering career aside to go study psychology. A whole decade-long academic track, starting from scratch.

I told her there are actually many ways to create a massive impact with exactly the technical background she already has. So I sent her to read about it on the EA websites.

She landed on a page about longtermism and existential risk reduction. She couldn't understand why any of it was relevant to her. Here was someone with the exact profile EA says it wants to reach: technically skilled, motivated by impact, ready to act. And we opened with the most abstract, most philosophically demanding version of the pitch before she'd even encountered the basic idea that some career paths do far more good than others.

She wasn't wrong to bounce. The content wasn't written for her. It was written for someone who'd already bought the premise.

I think this is EA's core growth problem. Not the ideas. The ideas are exceptional. The problem is [...]

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Outline:

(01:59) The bridge problem

(03:45) The sequencing problem

(05:32) What a better bridge looks like

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First published:

March 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Sipns4oezBLzKagCj/your-outreach-is-written-for-people-who-already-agree-with

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here.

In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to highly cost-effective programs in order to save and improve lives as much as we can. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year's grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.

Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.

Increased Grantmaking

In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Increased Grantmaking

(02:02) Double Our Cost-Effectiveness Threshold

(02:44) Expanded Cause Areas and Reach

(04:19) Urgent Response to Aid Cuts

(05:33) Continuing Our Growth in 2026 and Beyond

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First published:

March 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sruWKjiNrypj4brnL/givewell-s-2025-grantmaking-record-grants-expanded-reach-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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In my occasional advising calls with aspiring AI Safety folks, one of the most common questions I get is “What courses should I take next?” I often find myself replying: “None; go do stuff instead.”

Fabricando fit faber. By making, one becomes a maker.

There are a lot of courses in AI safety and governance. I’ve helped teach a few. Some are quite good! But after the tenth or twentieth person tells me “I’ve read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and taken BlueDot's AGI Strategy and the CAIS AI Safety course, I’m not sure whether I should do ARENA or apply to MATS…” I start to notice a pattern. I want to take them by the shoulders and say “THOSE ARE NOT YOUR ONLY CHOICES.”

Look. MATS is pretty cool. Many of their graduates do good work. It's also, AFAIK, swamped with promising applicants and eager young ML engineers.

If you think MATS sounds like a good fit for you, sure, you should probably apply. And then, while your keyboard is still cooling from the red-hot fire of your earnest expression of interest, you should turn that incandescent determination towards something you can do [...]

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First published:

March 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AWzcocxYTRBtxWA8b/we-do-not-live-by-course-alone

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crossposted from my blog

I am very fortunate to have my job in many ways – I get to talk to, learn from, and give money to amazing people and nonprofits all around the world. I get to allocate a modest amount of resources to incredible organisations that I think are doing some of the best work to improve the world. I don’t have to fundraise for my or my team's salaries anymore. However, there are some things I’ve learned since becoming a philanthropic grantmaker that were either surprising or affected me more strongly than I expected.

I will outline some of these below. These are not meant to invoke feelings of “oh poor grantmakers who have access to money and influence” but rather “oh, I never considered things from that perspective”. Hopefully, they will also lead to more productive working relationships between funders and advocacy groups.

Here, I discuss:

• How challenging the trade-offs are that funders face
• The extremely poor feedback mechanisms that nonprofits have
• How people treat you differently once you have access to funding, and how that changes you
• The weight of saying no to good groups
• Some things that make me feel cynical

Trade-offs [...]

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Outline:

(01:18) Trade-offs are hard and money is scarce

(06:35) Nonprofits have bad feedback mechanisms

(13:00) How people treat you differently (and how that changes you)

(14:52) Its hard to say no to people

(16:08) Its easy to become cynical

(19:38) Wrapping up

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First published:

March 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/umicYzuRsm6okFRKA/what-i-didn-t-expect-about-being-a-funder

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

If you just want a link to the video, watch it here!

What's AI in Context?

AI in Context is 80,000 Hours’ Video Program's YouTube channel, hosted by Aric Floyd. We’re trying to do high production documentary storytelling about transformative AI and its risks. You can see our retrospective on our first two videos here.

Why this topic?

We loved making our first two videos. We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence recently crossed 10M views, and our video about MechaHitler crossed 3M.

But when we reflected, we felt like we’d been circling around the central message we wanted to share. The specific AI 2027 scenario is really interesting, and the MechaHitler story is illuminating, but we wanted to make sure that at least once, we’d gone through the whole argument, or at least one whole argument, for being concerned about existential risk via loss of control over AI.

Honestly, that made it really convenient that Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

Nate and Eliezer have thought about this issue for a long time – especially Eliezer, who was debating the Singularity via mailing list around when Aric was [...]

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Outline:

(00:26) Whats AI in Context?

(00:47) Why this topic?

(01:30) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

(02:59) Heres what were going for:

(04:43) Subscribing and sharing

(05:08) Team Update and Logistics

(05:50) Thanks so much!

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First published:

March 10th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iGBTzbZFseNtDEd3n/new-video-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I.

Imagine you run a charity which gives cows to people in the developing world. Your new boyfriend is a statistician and you want to impress him, so you’ve decided to look into this Monitoring and Evaluation thing he keeps going on about. So you give a bunch of people cows and then follow up a year later, and sure enough the people you gave the cows to are richer, healthier, and happier. You proudly tell this to your boyfriend and expect to reap rewards in the form of admiration, cuddles, and a ‘yes’ to your marriage proposal.

Your boyfriend, however, isn’t impressed. What if everyone in the country is getting richer, because the country is industrializing? What if the poor people you gave cows to were having an unusually hard time, and then they got back on their feet, and your cows had nothing to do with it? Apparently, in order to get a sample that really says anything about the world, you need to randomly give cows to half the people, and then check whether the people you gave cows to are doing better than the people you didn’t give cows to (a “randomized controlled trial”).

This [...]

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First published:

March 10th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QsvFCcDR2TfSj32aM/the-joys-of-cash-benchmarking

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I work on the capacity-building team on the Global Catastrophic Risks-half of Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy). Our remit is, roughly, to increase the amount of talent aiming to prevent unprecedented, globally catastrophic events. These days, we’re mostly focused on AI, and we’ve funded a number of projects and grantees that readers of this post might be familiar with– including MATS, BlueDot Impact, Constellation, 80,000 Hours, CEA, the Curve, FAR.AI's events, university groups, and many other workshops and projects.

The post aims to make the case that broadly, capacity-building work (including on AI risk) has been and continues to be extremely impactful, and to encourage people to consider pursuing relevant projects and careers.

This post is written from my personal perspective; that said, my sense is that a number of CG staff and others in the AI safety space share my views. I include some quotes from them at the end of this post.

I’m writing this post partly out of a desire to correct what I perceive as an asymmetry in terms of how excited I and others at Coefficient Giving are about this kind of work vs. how much people in the EA and AI [...]

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Outline:

(02:15) The case for capacity-building work

(04:11) Surveys

(06:49) Testimonials

(08:21) Neel Nanda (Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind)

(11:15) Max Nadeau (Associate Program Officer (Technical AI Safety) at Coefficient Giving)

(12:51) Rachel Weinberg (founder and former head of The Curve, currently at AI Futures Project)

(14:30) Marius Hobbhann (CEO and founder of Apollo Research)

(16:38) Adam Kaufman (member of technical staff at Redwood Research)

(18:10) Gabriel Wu (member of technical staff (alignment) at OpenAI)

(19:37) Catherine Brewer (Senior Program Associate (AI Governance) at Coefficient Giving)

(21:12) Aric Floyd (video host for AI in Context)

(23:12) Ryan Kidd (Director of MATS)

(25:43) What tends to work?

(28:34) Whats good to do now?

(29:31) Who should be doing this work?

(31:02) What would doing this work look like?

(31:13) Working at an organization doing good work in the space

(31:46) Constellation - CEO

(32:46) Kairos - various early generalist positions

(33:42) Starting or running your own capacity-building project or organization

(34:07) Working on a capacity-building project part-time

(34:30) Subscribing to Multiplier, a Substack with thoughts from our team (and other AI grantmaking staff at CG)

(34:39) Letting our team know

(35:03) Social proof

(35:25) Julian Hazell, AI governance and policy at Coefficient Giving

(36:19) Trevor Levin, AI governance and policy at Coefficient Giving

(36:51) Ryan Greenblatt, Chief Scientist at Redwood Research:

(37:21) Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research

(39:52) Appendix

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First published:

March 10th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rAqKSSXankvys2Fzu/the-case-for-ai-safety-capacity-building-work

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

On 3 September 2022, Igor Kiriluk suddenly died (see EA Forum obituary). He was a great communicator and organized the first Moscow EA meetup. He had been active in the transhumanist scene since 2003 and even attracted the founders of KrioRus to transhumanism. He worked as community glue and visited every meetup.

On 5 January 2026, his closest friend Veter (Sergey Kamenev) had a dream that Igor's sideload (a mind-model based on an LLM) was created and that Igor calls him and suggests they celebrate his birthday. This was a signal I had been waiting for –I had wanted for some time to create a mind model of a dead person. I immediately started working.

We got an archive of his private communications, 2,000 pages, and 1,300 pages of scientific publications. His mother decided to collaborate and provided a lot of memories, recordings, and photos. Only two long videos exist. Altogether it is a 4,000-page mindfile = 3M tokens.

I decided on a new approach ­– instead of building a passive chatbot, to program an agent. After some experiments, I ended up giving Claude Code an instruction: roleplay this person as an agent – along with a lot of [...]

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Outline:

(04:22) Post by Igors sideload

(08:07) System Overview by Claude Code

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First published:

March 8th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JLHxnWxXk4zYwFcHs/recreation-of-ea-pioneer-igor-kiriluk

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Introduction

A few years ago, John Fogle initiated an effort to support and coordinate people from a military background seeking career transitions with an impact focus - High Impact Defense (HI-DEF). The majority of this effort looked a bit like the career-advice services provided by 80000 Hours and others. There's a lot of context implicitly shared between military people, and I'm sure those involved appreciated John's time in trying to understand their specific circumstances.

Owing to changes in his spare capacity, John has been unable to continue this project and graciously offered me the keys for HI-DEF. After some deliberation, I have accepted the offer, as I think I'm in a particularly good position to lead this effort:

• I have been around the EA community for a while.
• My transition to civilian life has led me to a job in the AI Security community. Military experience is precisely what enables me to add value to our team, so my advocacy on behalf of those with similar experience has credibility.
• Transferring to the Reserves, I will retain my rank and remain current in my professional niche. These come with significant networking benefits.
• I have the time and inclination to [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Introduction

(01:47) Military experience through the EA lens

(04:20) #1 General advising

(05:47) #2 Targeted advising/outreach

(08:07) #3 Research x Military

(10:16) #4 Community engagement

(11:22) Networking

(11:52) Concluding remarks

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First published:

March 8th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SBswbiTgsPT6bmihg/high-impact-defense-a-request-for-strategic-takes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Forum note: this post embodies the spirit of a new project I—Matt Reardon—am starting to reinvigorate in-person EA communities. I'm hiring a co-founder and I'm interested in meeting others who want to collaborate on this vision. My DMs are open.

Sequence thinkers will be forgiven and rejoice

In some fleeting moments lately, I catch glimpses of 2022—the year Effective Altruism's ascent seemed unstoppable. Universally positive (if limited) press, big groups at top universities across the world, a young EA entrepreneur was the darling of the financial industry, the first EA running for Congress calling in enormous financial and personnel resources for his campaign. More than those public-facing facts though, was a feeling on the ground that if you had a good grip on things and a plausible idea, you would get funding, go to the Bay, and make it happen.

I actually regret how slow I was to see it at the time. You could just do things, and yes, that's always been true, but at that time, you didn’t even have excuses. In my first year as an advisor at 80,000 Hours, I allowed people a lot of excuses. I think this came from [...]

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Outline:

(02:37) The Retreat

(07:03) What Greatness Demands

(10:59) Effective Altruism is Good and Right

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First published:

March 7th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uHhcqagBBkhFTTGpq/effective-altruism-will-be-great-again

Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/frommatter/p/effective-altruism-will-be-great

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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