Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding, published by habryka on June 14, 2023 on LessWrong.

Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding and are working on the following projects:

We run LessWrong, the AI Alignment Forum, and have written a lot of the code behind the Effective Altruism Forum.

During 2022 and early 2023 we ran the Lightcone Offices, and are now building out a campus at the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, where we've been doing repairs and renovations for the past few months.

We've also been substantially involved in the Survival and Flourishing Fund's S-Process (having written the app that runs the process) and are now running Lightspeed Grants.

We also pursue a wide range of other smaller projects in the space of "community infrastructure" and "community crisis management". This includes running events, investigating harm caused by community institutions and actors, supporting programs like SERI MATS, and maintaining various small pieces of software infrastructure.

If you are interested in funding us, please shoot me an email at [email protected] (or if you want to give smaller amounts, you can donate directly via PayPal here).

Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX, and I do think we work on projects that have a decent chance of reducing existential risk and generally making humanity's future go a lot better, though this kind of stuff sure is hard to tell. We are looking to raise around $3M to $6M for our operations in the next 12 months.

Also feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Two draft readers of this post expressed confusion that Lightcone needs money, given that we just announced a funding process that is promising to give away $5M in the next two months. The answer to that is that we do not own the money moved via Lightspeed Grants and are only providing grant recommendations to Jaan Tallinn and other funders.

We do separately apply for funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, through which Jaan has been our second biggest funder. We also continue to actively fundraise from both SFF and Open Philanthropy (our largest funder).

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