Funny what happens when the wealthy people who kept you around as a sort of amusing pet now make insane amounts of money off the back of the thing you claim is an existential risk. He still has the Zizians, though! As far as I can tell those are the only folks who ever *actually* took what he says to its logical conclusion.
Feel free to discuss on other sneer club https://awful.systems/post/6720327 The matching donation from Survival and Flourishing Fund could be a way of saying Jaan Tallinn but they work with other donors.
I think i beat you to the punch when they announced the fundraiser, lol. Though, looks like they doubled funding since my post (which isn't very impressive).
Worth noting, though, half of what they raised is matching. And not really unexpected considering some of their connections and past donations. I guess the days of finding some SBF type or anonymous crypto billionaire to send them a few million on demand are behind them.
:shrug: Any nerdy nonproffit I know would be ecstatic to get offered $1.6m of matching donations and MIRI is not the people's favourite like the food bank or the SPCA. But they don't want to live like nonprofit staff any more, they want to live like Google staff.
I agree, just that considering how they could previously conjure huge sums from billionaires and anonymous crypto multimillionaires in their orbit, that they are now struggling to crowdfund a fraction of some of those donations seems to me like a decline. Though, seems donations have sped up recently in the past few days.
I was looking for parallels and today Burning Man has 110 full-time staff, junkets overseas, and deficits in the tens of millions / year https://sfist.com/2024/12/20/burning-man-admits-to-14-million-deficit-says-ticket-price-hikes-may-be-in-the-works/ So some nerdy events get big money, just not ones I or my friends organize or attend. Any paper-and-whiteboards type of academic institution would be very happy with a $10m endowment and a million or two a year in donations! But they want to spend two or three times what they can sustain.
They’ve got an endowment, Eliezer is taking out huge salaries to invest (probably in OpenAI et al, just like Scott), CFAR is sitting on $18million of Berkeley property - they’re sadly not going anywhere.
Neither MIRI nor CFAR nor Lightcone has an endowment. MIRI has been burning capital given to them in 2021. CFAR had a million in cash, $22,026,042 of real estate, and a $20,848,988 mortgage as of end of 2024. Thus the need for more money.
If MIRI had just stuck that crypto money in an index fund, we would have to hear about them forever. My priors are that Yud is about as good at investing as he is at programming or philosophy.
I thought MIRI had set a big chunk aside, like $10m? But the last time I looked at their 990s was a couple of years ago, it was totally news to me that he was taking $500k salaries. It would make me so profoundly happy if Eliezer had blown MIRI’s reserves on crank semiconductor stocks.
Thank you for sharing and digging into the numbers! I can only hope that someday some reporter will want to dig into the disgusting waste of money at these places: Eliezer getting paid to visit catgirl cafes in Japan and write racy fanfic to hypnotize the next generation of angry, lonely, gifted/arrogant kids, Nate getting paid to be paranoid and share a communications doc with his employees that states that flirting is a good way to connect with him, Katja getting paid to create embarrassingly amateur surveys, Anna getting paid to write painfully emotionless responses on LW to equally painfully non-accusatory accounts of her directing an unlicensed psychology clinic, underlings working their way up the EA/AI prestige ladder by running “operations” (buying lunches, taking out dry cleaning, commenting on LW) or “communications” (writing maybe 3 fawning and amateurish blog posts a year for the website, commenting on LW, co-authoring erotica with Eliezer)…. These folks really chap my ass.
A traditional endowment is invested to grow and 3-5% per year is withdrawn so it can exist for decades. The Boston elite had a joke about a woman who turned to prostitution rather than dip into capital. MIRI received $25 million in 2021 and that has been shrinking ever since. Remember that this is an apocalyptic movement of incompetent people, they are not sure humans will exist in ten years. I note that BEMC, founded by someone in the finance industry who seems to have rich parents, created a foundation and donates 5-10% of its value every year rather than letting Effective Altruists manage the capital.
Edit: IIRC MIRI has about $10m left but will burn through that in 2 or 3 more years at current spending and they want to spend faster
Funny what happens when the wealthy people who kept you around as a sort of amusing pet now make insane amounts of money off the back of the thing you claim is an existential risk. He still has the Zizians, though! As far as I can tell those are the only folks who ever *actually* took what he says to its logical conclusion.
Hey they did very good marketing work for those billionaires, they probably got their money's worth. They framed the public AI discourse.
Feel free to discuss on other sneer club https://awful.systems/post/6720327 The matching donation from Survival and Flourishing Fund could be a way of saying Jaan Tallinn but they work with other donors.
I think i beat you to the punch when they announced the fundraiser, lol. Though, looks like they doubled funding since my post (which isn't very impressive).
Sorry I missed it. Raising $1.3m of funds is impressive but they clearly overestimated what their supporters were able to give.
Worth noting, though, half of what they raised is matching. And not really unexpected considering some of their connections and past donations. I guess the days of finding some SBF type or anonymous crypto billionaire to send them a few million on demand are behind them.
:shrug: Any nerdy nonproffit I know would be ecstatic to get offered $1.6m of matching donations and MIRI is not the people's favourite like the food bank or the SPCA. But they don't want to live like nonprofit staff any more, they want to live like Google staff.
I agree, just that considering how they could previously conjure huge sums from billionaires and anonymous crypto multimillionaires in their orbit, that they are now struggling to crowdfund a fraction of some of those donations seems to me like a decline. Though, seems donations have sped up recently in the past few days.
I was looking for parallels and today Burning Man has 110 full-time staff, junkets overseas, and deficits in the tens of millions / year https://sfist.com/2024/12/20/burning-man-admits-to-14-million-deficit-says-ticket-price-hikes-may-be-in-the-works/ So some nerdy events get big money, just not ones I or my friends organize or attend. Any paper-and-whiteboards type of academic institution would be very happy with a $10m endowment and a million or two a year in donations! But they want to spend two or three times what they can sustain.
They’ve got an endowment, Eliezer is taking out huge salaries to invest (probably in OpenAI et al, just like Scott), CFAR is sitting on $18million of Berkeley property - they’re sadly not going anywhere.
This is where Form 990 helps!
Neither MIRI nor CFAR nor Lightcone has an endowment. MIRI has been burning capital given to them in 2021. CFAR had a million in cash, $22,026,042 of real estate, and a $20,848,988 mortgage as of end of 2024. Thus the need for more money.
If MIRI had just stuck that crypto money in an index fund, we would have to hear about them forever. My priors are that Yud is about as good at investing as he is at programming or philosophy.
I thought MIRI had set a big chunk aside, like $10m? But the last time I looked at their 990s was a couple of years ago, it was totally news to me that he was taking $500k salaries. It would make me so profoundly happy if Eliezer had blown MIRI’s reserves on crank semiconductor stocks.
Thank you for sharing and digging into the numbers! I can only hope that someday some reporter will want to dig into the disgusting waste of money at these places: Eliezer getting paid to visit catgirl cafes in Japan and write racy fanfic to hypnotize the next generation of angry, lonely, gifted/arrogant kids, Nate getting paid to be paranoid and share a communications doc with his employees that states that flirting is a good way to connect with him, Katja getting paid to create embarrassingly amateur surveys, Anna getting paid to write painfully emotionless responses on LW to equally painfully non-accusatory accounts of her directing an unlicensed psychology clinic, underlings working their way up the EA/AI prestige ladder by running “operations” (buying lunches, taking out dry cleaning, commenting on LW) or “communications” (writing maybe 3 fawning and amateurish blog posts a year for the website, commenting on LW, co-authoring erotica with Eliezer)…. These folks really chap my ass.
Do you have a link for the Nate Soares thing?
A traditional endowment is invested to grow and 3-5% per year is withdrawn so it can exist for decades. The Boston elite had a joke about a woman who turned to prostitution rather than dip into capital. MIRI received $25 million in 2021 and that has been shrinking ever since. Remember that this is an apocalyptic movement of incompetent people, they are not sure humans will exist in ten years. I note that BEMC, founded by someone in the finance industry who seems to have rich parents, created a foundation and donates 5-10% of its value every year rather than letting Effective Altruists manage the capital.
Edit: IIRC MIRI has about $10m left but will burn through that in 2 or 3 more years at current spending and they want to spend faster
I’ll message you!