Nan, I hope this forecast is right, but I’m less concerned about the supply of philanthropic capital than the apparent decline in philanthropic conviction.
AI will undoubtedly create a new generation of billionaires. The real question is whether they’ll feel a meaningful obligation to society once they get there.
Recent trends aren’t encouraging. New Giving Pledge signatories have slowed. Some prominent tech leaders have become openly skeptical of large-scale philanthropy. Peter Thiel has publicly criticized the Giving Pledge model and encouraged wealthy peers to distance themselves from it. Meanwhile, many companies that once championed ESG and stakeholder capitalism have quietly retreated when political pressure mounted.
Philanthropy is ultimately a function of values, not wealth. If commitments to societal well-being disappear when they become controversial, inconvenient, or costly, they were never much of a commitment in the first place.
The future may depend less on how much wealth AI creates than on whether its beneficiaries see themselves as stewards of society—or simply winners of the race.
"Philanthropy is ultimately a function of values, not wealth. If commitments to societal well-being disappear when they become controversial, inconvenient, or costly, they were never much of a commitment in the first place."
This seems like a false dichotomy.
Imagine if you had a gravely ill family member. You visit them, and help by preparing meals, helping them bathe, and so forth. But your family member never says thanks, and instead finds fault with everything you do. Can you see how your enthusiasm for helping your family member might wane?
Now imagine that your family member notices your enthusiasm waning, and said: "You never loved me, did you. If your commitment to helping me wanes when I complain, it was never much of a commitment in the first place." How would that make you feel?
I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Some billionaires are extremely committed to helping. Some billionaires are extremely committed to hoarding their wealth. And there are a lot of billionaires in the middle, who feel somewhat motivated to help, but lose enthusiasm when they notice that philanthropy generates negative PR.
Seriously, based on the negative public reaction, I sometimes get the impression that people would actually prefer that a billionaire buy themselves a yacht than start a foundation. It's very weird. I suppose internet commenters are not necessarily representative of public opinion at large, however.
The majority in the middle don’t lose enthusiasm mainly because of negative PR, they lose it when they see their resources being using in effectively or even to negative progress.
The key is to find ways to generate and maintain alignment between the donors, the people running the programs the donors fund and the people the programs are designed to help.
That’s a 3-body problem that’s as hard as the 3 body problem in physics.
But it can be done. I’ve seen it happen. It requires ongoing alignment discipline and my wife and I are focused on teaching the mindset, skillset, and now we have a tech platform toolkit, to consistently resolve the chaos of that 3 body problem.
Hi Ray. I agree with your reflection. I guess the only way to believe in these numbers is to see actual deployment of funds from 3rd Generation Philanthropy to the causes listed but not disguised under the banner of philanthropy.
If I were to push back on this, I'd say that the frame is very much about what 'other people' can do. And instead I think these problems will be solved by individuals and teams. So either you the reader are such an individual or you aren't. I don't think reading this and nodding changes much if you don't do anything towards it.
I think if you think this is good advice, perhaps spending 3 minutes thinking if you have a specific problem to solve or piece of infrastructure to build. And if not, then stop thinking until next time this comes up. But if so, create time to work on that problem. Then, when the money arrives you'll be able to usefully use it.
This is a serious piece by a serious operator, and it scares the crap out of me. It is right about the thing most people miss: the binding constraint on this wave is not money. It is absorptive capacity. She is correct that almost no one is building for that gap, but there is, in this piece, a contempt for existing nonprofits that scares me.
Belief 3, at least, admits they exist: "traditional philanthropic orgs and people won't cut it." Everywhere else, the people who already do this work don't appear at all. Not dismissed. Absent. Four thousand words about a talent shortage, written as if the field were empty and waiting to be built on.
The contempt beneath it — not hers, necessarily, but that of this approach — rests on a category error about the word talent. As though the people who can absorb $50 billion don't yet exist and must be recruited out of tech.
They exist. They are employed, right now, by the organizations the piece never quite sees. They are real, working, and in need of assistance. They are underpaid, overworked, burning out, and over-credentialed in the only currency that matters here: having actually done the thing.
The piece believes problems get solved — that with enough talent density and speed you ship a fix and exit, the way you would a product. But a food bank is not a failed startup that never reached escape velocity. Done right, it's permanent community capacity. Permanence isn't a lack of ambition; it is the ambition. Tech people build their whole model around the exit. There is no exit from the human condition.
She runs the numbers to prove scarcity — $50 billion is six Gates Foundations, or 5,000 Institutes for Progress — and since those don't exist yet, we're told there's nowhere to put the money.
Run the list the other way. There are more than 1.5 million 501(c)(3)s in this country, and 88% of them operate on less than $500,000 a year. To an organization that size, a $250,000 grant isn't assistance — it's a miracle. $50 billion is 200,000 grants of that size, every year — a transformative check to one of every eight charities in America.
The money is not short of vessels. There are a million and a half of them. It is short of vessels anyone in that room finds impressive. And they're wrong.
If this is the way these foundations go, the billions will arrive, go looking for talent, and walk straight past the people already doing the job. The way this piece just did.
Tech people are not special, they work in a industry where scaling and optimisation is comparatively easy.
Regardless, the people who know where the problem is and how to solve it are downstream of colonialism, war and climate genocide.
We should be making unconditional cash transfers to individuals trying to run businesses, schools, refugee camps and hospitals simultaneously with no money, not trying to entice people out of the US private sector who we think might have a brilliant solution to their problems. The people with the problems know what they are and how to solve them – give them the money, power and control.
This piece was clearly written from a tech people standpoint. The problem is the tech people in silicon valley see and work with people who look like them, talk like them, and think like them everyday, they forget the mass majority of people around the world are nothing like them. Yet they have the self-crowned entitlement that makes them think they understand the world and they're doing everyone else a favor. As long as the tech hub of people keep living in this echo chamber, however much money they give for philanthropy would still fund the system that has been creating problems for the world. Not to mention assuming these tech giants would actually give the money they said they would is an ambitious and even naive assumption.
I will give you the simplest way to spend all of this money, and more. Fund food stamps for every single person in this country, regardless of income, as an entitlement.
It's an extraordinarily efficient program, with prebuilt payment infrastructure already in place, and ensures people everywhere can have access to good quality, fresh food. It also supports local jobs and local economies.
None of this BS about techifying philanthropy, creating complicated capital allocator systems, etc. Just give the money back to the people so they can live better lives.
Americans are already filthy rich by global standards. We have nearly the highest median income in the world, adjusted for cost of living. Why would you give more free stuff to people who are already rich?
"Traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it. These problems demand tech-caliber talent and execution." I'm worried if this happens. We need more people with philosophical/moral/ethical even religious (dare I say it???!) calibre talent at this point.
Seems like they have a lot of directionally correct ideas but poisoned a bit by euro/brit thinking about scale and process. IMO if you want founder types to consider non-profits instead you need to 10x those numbers and drop the whole mentorship thing.
This is essential reading - utterly incredible, vital, and timely post. I would recommend some of what @Judd Rosenblatt is doing with the AI Alignment Fund and also very much @John Bridgeland’s work on Civic Moonshots (which comes at this kind of work from a complimentary angle to a lot of the tech-first funders/orgs, but with the same entrepreneurial sensibility).
Carnegie built 2509 libraries between 1883 and 1929. How much lasting public benefit infrastructure will be created with this philanthropy will be a test of its usefulness.
There was a Carnegie Library in the town that I grew up in that had a plaque about him. He was very poor as an immigrant kid and didn’t have enough to buy books and their was a story of the retired businessman who opened up is own collection of book to Andrew once a week.
In 1899 Andrew told the NY Times “He only had about 400 volumes in his library, but they were valuable books, and I shall never forget the enjoyment and the instruction I gained from them when I was too poor to buy books myself. Is it any wonder that I decided then and there that if ever I had any surplus wealth I would use it in lending books to others?”
However, I expect a big chunk of the OpenAI Foundation's capital to sit there for a while until Sam Altman figures out a way to use it again for their commercial purposes. I hope I'm wrong!
The 2025 destruction of USAID has upended the philanthropic world globally. In 2024, USAID managed more than $35B in assistance; current USG development support has declined dramatically and is in disarray within the State Department. The Rockefeller Foundation estimates that this decline in funding could cause 23M additional deaths by 2030, including over 5M children under 5.
As new philanthropic funding becomes available, there is an opportunity to build a stronger infrastructure for lifesaving global health delivery and development assistance. USAID was a highly imperfect agency, but it delivered lifesaving support, preventing disability and death due to HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. US declines in funding to Gavi, the Global Fund, and the WHO have further weakened the global public health system.
Rather than focusing exclusively on research, AI, and innovation, new philanthropic funding has an opportunity to save lives today and build a healthier, more equal world. Anthropic has long-standing ties to GiveWell, which recommends highly cost-effective interventions including malaria prevention, efforts to improve childhood vaccination rates, and others. Urgent funding gaps at Gavi and elsewhere could be met with greater philanthropic support, leading to fewer lives lost.
Nan, this is a very important article. Thank you for writing and calling out this future. However, the problem has been staring us in the face for a very long time. Salaries and investment in operations will bring the highest talent, and will provide the infrastructure to retain this talent. With the exception of leaders like MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, the Ford Foundation and few others, it is the funders that do not support investment into infrastructure and operations. It is the staff that makes delivering the mission possible - hands down. And they do this heavy work on a whim, instinct, prayer and not much else. Very few leaders arrive with any formal training in logistics, operations, financial management or strategic planning. They certainly are not arriving with much experience in AI applications. Yet, many are responsible for thousands and millions of dollars, answering to boards that are barely engaged. I've run these organizations and I'm now coaching these organizational leaders through their isolated problem solving. The response to nonprofits that funding is only for programming that is measurable directly to the beneficiary is as good as saying to someone I'll pay for the hose for your garden, but there is no where for you to hook up to a flow of water. Fund operations and fund the training and education to make these organizations operationally sophisticated and sustainable. Perhaps free access to a collaboration between Anthropic the IU School of Lilly School of Philanthropy might begin to address this need. It must create collaborative communities - not keep leaders siloed. We need each other, we need to build for one another.
Thanks for writing this. I would add a few things (I've been thinking about and working on deployment tools and the deployment ecosystem for AI money for about 7 months):
- I agree that more capital allocators would be useful (for example, many more 'thesis-driven funds'). However, they are going to be severely constrained by all wanting to fund the same cause areas and organisations, if they are all concentrated in the EA cause areas. Right now, I think we could create hundreds of new funds without meaningfully solving the problems you outline above. In general, the most likely outcome at present is that this capital sits around doing nothing.
- There is often a lot of reluctance to delegate capital allocation, so even if we had a lot of good smaller allocators, with good orgs to fund, I wouldn't be super bullish about OpenAI Foundation giving billions to other people to deploy. At present, GiveWell gives ~nothing to others to regrant, and cG fairly small amounts relative to their size (although, of course, both could increase their regranting if they have a lot of surplus funds).
- All the stuff above emphasises the need for more good, scalable projects to absorb more funding. If those existed, a lot of the issues above would go away. I do just want to sound a note of caution, though, about encouraging a sort of laissez-faire startup style marketplace of new philanthropic projects. I'm very uncertain that the commercial startup world is a good model for the philanthropic world, because the chance of causing harm seems much higher in the philanthropic space. For example, if someone founds a bad commercial startup and it goes wrong, it usually just fails, with some harm to its employees and customers. But if someone founds a bad charity in global health, it might lead to extremely severe suffering or death, and if someone founds a bad AI safety startup, it might dramatically accelerate massive harms, possibly even the end of humanity. So I see that having thousands of new startups would help to deploy the upcoming cash but it's far from obvious that that would improve the state of the world (especially if the founders of these startups had zero relevant experience, which is sort of what your post implies - you wouldn't be the first person to call for people to bring a tech startup mindset to philanthropy, and there is a reason that approach hasn't exactly caught on).
So anyway, I agree very much with your post directionally, but I'm not sure how well the solutions will work.
"Build the infrastructure to make it super easy for individual funders to deploy" - Yup - I'm building this with an AI Safety funder - https://www.grantmaking.ai/
I think the speed and the measurement piece are two really interesting points here. I work at a small nonprofit that does work around how AI intersects with gender and civic life. We've had plenty of discussions with some of the existing orgs that would fall into the capital allocators bucket of your chart, and none of them are moving fast to get money out the door - which generally speaking is a big issue with philanthropy overall, the process from initial connection to funding opportunity to money landing in accounts is way too long.
On the measurement piece. I think you're absolutely right that the current emphasis on measuring impact is way too focused on quantitative measurements, and less on "squishier" qualitative measurements. This makes organizations that focus on civic engagement, community building, and other deeply human areas struggle to find funding because of the difficulty in quantifying long-term impact. Not only do we need people to outline the problems, we need a broad agreement on what success looks like, and how we'll know if we got there. Otherwise no matter how good the funding ecosystem is, the organizations who want that funding or would be poised to use it well are never going to be able to utilize it.
Nan, I hope this forecast is right, but I’m less concerned about the supply of philanthropic capital than the apparent decline in philanthropic conviction.
AI will undoubtedly create a new generation of billionaires. The real question is whether they’ll feel a meaningful obligation to society once they get there.
Recent trends aren’t encouraging. New Giving Pledge signatories have slowed. Some prominent tech leaders have become openly skeptical of large-scale philanthropy. Peter Thiel has publicly criticized the Giving Pledge model and encouraged wealthy peers to distance themselves from it. Meanwhile, many companies that once championed ESG and stakeholder capitalism have quietly retreated when political pressure mounted.
Philanthropy is ultimately a function of values, not wealth. If commitments to societal well-being disappear when they become controversial, inconvenient, or costly, they were never much of a commitment in the first place.
The future may depend less on how much wealth AI creates than on whether its beneficiaries see themselves as stewards of society—or simply winners of the race.
"Philanthropy is ultimately a function of values, not wealth. If commitments to societal well-being disappear when they become controversial, inconvenient, or costly, they were never much of a commitment in the first place."
This seems like a false dichotomy.
Imagine if you had a gravely ill family member. You visit them, and help by preparing meals, helping them bathe, and so forth. But your family member never says thanks, and instead finds fault with everything you do. Can you see how your enthusiasm for helping your family member might wane?
Now imagine that your family member notices your enthusiasm waning, and said: "You never loved me, did you. If your commitment to helping me wanes when I complain, it was never much of a commitment in the first place." How would that make you feel?
I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Some billionaires are extremely committed to helping. Some billionaires are extremely committed to hoarding their wealth. And there are a lot of billionaires in the middle, who feel somewhat motivated to help, but lose enthusiasm when they notice that philanthropy generates negative PR.
Seriously, based on the negative public reaction, I sometimes get the impression that people would actually prefer that a billionaire buy themselves a yacht than start a foundation. It's very weird. I suppose internet commenters are not necessarily representative of public opinion at large, however.
The majority in the middle don’t lose enthusiasm mainly because of negative PR, they lose it when they see their resources being using in effectively or even to negative progress.
The key is to find ways to generate and maintain alignment between the donors, the people running the programs the donors fund and the people the programs are designed to help.
That’s a 3-body problem that’s as hard as the 3 body problem in physics.
But it can be done. I’ve seen it happen. It requires ongoing alignment discipline and my wife and I are focused on teaching the mindset, skillset, and now we have a tech platform toolkit, to consistently resolve the chaos of that 3 body problem.
The toolkit is in beta at www.quickalign.ai
I’m looking for leaders and champions to join us to learn all this and bring it to the world.
The brand will evolve and be hosted ultimately at www.align.world.
Hi Ray. I agree with your reflection. I guess the only way to believe in these numbers is to see actual deployment of funds from 3rd Generation Philanthropy to the causes listed but not disguised under the banner of philanthropy.
If I were to push back on this, I'd say that the frame is very much about what 'other people' can do. And instead I think these problems will be solved by individuals and teams. So either you the reader are such an individual or you aren't. I don't think reading this and nodding changes much if you don't do anything towards it.
I think if you think this is good advice, perhaps spending 3 minutes thinking if you have a specific problem to solve or piece of infrastructure to build. And if not, then stop thinking until next time this comes up. But if so, create time to work on that problem. Then, when the money arrives you'll be able to usefully use it.
This is a serious piece by a serious operator, and it scares the crap out of me. It is right about the thing most people miss: the binding constraint on this wave is not money. It is absorptive capacity. She is correct that almost no one is building for that gap, but there is, in this piece, a contempt for existing nonprofits that scares me.
Belief 3, at least, admits they exist: "traditional philanthropic orgs and people won't cut it." Everywhere else, the people who already do this work don't appear at all. Not dismissed. Absent. Four thousand words about a talent shortage, written as if the field were empty and waiting to be built on.
The contempt beneath it — not hers, necessarily, but that of this approach — rests on a category error about the word talent. As though the people who can absorb $50 billion don't yet exist and must be recruited out of tech.
They exist. They are employed, right now, by the organizations the piece never quite sees. They are real, working, and in need of assistance. They are underpaid, overworked, burning out, and over-credentialed in the only currency that matters here: having actually done the thing.
The piece believes problems get solved — that with enough talent density and speed you ship a fix and exit, the way you would a product. But a food bank is not a failed startup that never reached escape velocity. Done right, it's permanent community capacity. Permanence isn't a lack of ambition; it is the ambition. Tech people build their whole model around the exit. There is no exit from the human condition.
She runs the numbers to prove scarcity — $50 billion is six Gates Foundations, or 5,000 Institutes for Progress — and since those don't exist yet, we're told there's nowhere to put the money.
Run the list the other way. There are more than 1.5 million 501(c)(3)s in this country, and 88% of them operate on less than $500,000 a year. To an organization that size, a $250,000 grant isn't assistance — it's a miracle. $50 billion is 200,000 grants of that size, every year — a transformative check to one of every eight charities in America.
The money is not short of vessels. There are a million and a half of them. It is short of vessels anyone in that room finds impressive. And they're wrong.
If this is the way these foundations go, the billions will arrive, go looking for talent, and walk straight past the people already doing the job. The way this piece just did.
Belief 3 is false and a false dichotomy.
Tech people are not special, they work in a industry where scaling and optimisation is comparatively easy.
Regardless, the people who know where the problem is and how to solve it are downstream of colonialism, war and climate genocide.
We should be making unconditional cash transfers to individuals trying to run businesses, schools, refugee camps and hospitals simultaneously with no money, not trying to entice people out of the US private sector who we think might have a brilliant solution to their problems. The people with the problems know what they are and how to solve them – give them the money, power and control.
This piece was clearly written from a tech people standpoint. The problem is the tech people in silicon valley see and work with people who look like them, talk like them, and think like them everyday, they forget the mass majority of people around the world are nothing like them. Yet they have the self-crowned entitlement that makes them think they understand the world and they're doing everyone else a favor. As long as the tech hub of people keep living in this echo chamber, however much money they give for philanthropy would still fund the system that has been creating problems for the world. Not to mention assuming these tech giants would actually give the money they said they would is an ambitious and even naive assumption.
"but we need new institutions, we have planet-scale problems, you can't just solve that with unconditional cash transfers"
Give the money and the power to the people with the problem and enable them to build the institutions they need to support them.
"I'm a tech person and I am special"
OK good – go and find the people with the problem and report for duty, ask them what they need your help with.
Yes to this 100%. Recapitalize the uncapitalized.
I will give you the simplest way to spend all of this money, and more. Fund food stamps for every single person in this country, regardless of income, as an entitlement.
It's an extraordinarily efficient program, with prebuilt payment infrastructure already in place, and ensures people everywhere can have access to good quality, fresh food. It also supports local jobs and local economies.
None of this BS about techifying philanthropy, creating complicated capital allocator systems, etc. Just give the money back to the people so they can live better lives.
Americans are already filthy rich by global standards. We have nearly the highest median income in the world, adjusted for cost of living. Why would you give more free stuff to people who are already rich?
"Traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it. These problems demand tech-caliber talent and execution." I'm worried if this happens. We need more people with philosophical/moral/ethical even religious (dare I say it???!) calibre talent at this point.
Is Ambitious Impact (https://www.ambitiousimpact.com/) the YC for philanthropic venture?
Seems like they have a lot of directionally correct ideas but poisoned a bit by euro/brit thinking about scale and process. IMO if you want founder types to consider non-profits instead you need to 10x those numbers and drop the whole mentorship thing.
This is essential reading - utterly incredible, vital, and timely post. I would recommend some of what @Judd Rosenblatt is doing with the AI Alignment Fund and also very much @John Bridgeland’s work on Civic Moonshots (which comes at this kind of work from a complimentary angle to a lot of the tech-first funders/orgs, but with the same entrepreneurial sensibility).
Carnegie built 2509 libraries between 1883 and 1929. How much lasting public benefit infrastructure will be created with this philanthropy will be a test of its usefulness.
I've always been interested in the person or team that either took the idea to Carnegie or executed it... has anyone read anything about this?
There was a Carnegie Library in the town that I grew up in that had a plaque about him. He was very poor as an immigrant kid and didn’t have enough to buy books and their was a story of the retired businessman who opened up is own collection of book to Andrew once a week.
In 1899 Andrew told the NY Times “He only had about 400 volumes in his library, but they were valuable books, and I shall never forget the enjoyment and the instruction I gained from them when I was too poor to buy books myself. Is it any wonder that I decided then and there that if ever I had any surplus wealth I would use it in lending books to others?”
His own autobiography is a good source.
I came to similar numbers a month ago:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ychu2LAw54sNcocKH/the-anthropic-ipo-is-coming-we-aren-t-ready-for-it?commentId=gwmXQfvnKosv7dALT
However, I expect a big chunk of the OpenAI Foundation's capital to sit there for a while until Sam Altman figures out a way to use it again for their commercial purposes. I hope I'm wrong!
The 2025 destruction of USAID has upended the philanthropic world globally. In 2024, USAID managed more than $35B in assistance; current USG development support has declined dramatically and is in disarray within the State Department. The Rockefeller Foundation estimates that this decline in funding could cause 23M additional deaths by 2030, including over 5M children under 5.
As new philanthropic funding becomes available, there is an opportunity to build a stronger infrastructure for lifesaving global health delivery and development assistance. USAID was a highly imperfect agency, but it delivered lifesaving support, preventing disability and death due to HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. US declines in funding to Gavi, the Global Fund, and the WHO have further weakened the global public health system.
Rather than focusing exclusively on research, AI, and innovation, new philanthropic funding has an opportunity to save lives today and build a healthier, more equal world. Anthropic has long-standing ties to GiveWell, which recommends highly cost-effective interventions including malaria prevention, efforts to improve childhood vaccination rates, and others. Urgent funding gaps at Gavi and elsewhere could be met with greater philanthropic support, leading to fewer lives lost.
Nan, this is a very important article. Thank you for writing and calling out this future. However, the problem has been staring us in the face for a very long time. Salaries and investment in operations will bring the highest talent, and will provide the infrastructure to retain this talent. With the exception of leaders like MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, the Ford Foundation and few others, it is the funders that do not support investment into infrastructure and operations. It is the staff that makes delivering the mission possible - hands down. And they do this heavy work on a whim, instinct, prayer and not much else. Very few leaders arrive with any formal training in logistics, operations, financial management or strategic planning. They certainly are not arriving with much experience in AI applications. Yet, many are responsible for thousands and millions of dollars, answering to boards that are barely engaged. I've run these organizations and I'm now coaching these organizational leaders through their isolated problem solving. The response to nonprofits that funding is only for programming that is measurable directly to the beneficiary is as good as saying to someone I'll pay for the hose for your garden, but there is no where for you to hook up to a flow of water. Fund operations and fund the training and education to make these organizations operationally sophisticated and sustainable. Perhaps free access to a collaboration between Anthropic the IU School of Lilly School of Philanthropy might begin to address this need. It must create collaborative communities - not keep leaders siloed. We need each other, we need to build for one another.
Thanks for writing this. I would add a few things (I've been thinking about and working on deployment tools and the deployment ecosystem for AI money for about 7 months):
- I agree that more capital allocators would be useful (for example, many more 'thesis-driven funds'). However, they are going to be severely constrained by all wanting to fund the same cause areas and organisations, if they are all concentrated in the EA cause areas. Right now, I think we could create hundreds of new funds without meaningfully solving the problems you outline above. In general, the most likely outcome at present is that this capital sits around doing nothing.
- There is often a lot of reluctance to delegate capital allocation, so even if we had a lot of good smaller allocators, with good orgs to fund, I wouldn't be super bullish about OpenAI Foundation giving billions to other people to deploy. At present, GiveWell gives ~nothing to others to regrant, and cG fairly small amounts relative to their size (although, of course, both could increase their regranting if they have a lot of surplus funds).
- All the stuff above emphasises the need for more good, scalable projects to absorb more funding. If those existed, a lot of the issues above would go away. I do just want to sound a note of caution, though, about encouraging a sort of laissez-faire startup style marketplace of new philanthropic projects. I'm very uncertain that the commercial startup world is a good model for the philanthropic world, because the chance of causing harm seems much higher in the philanthropic space. For example, if someone founds a bad commercial startup and it goes wrong, it usually just fails, with some harm to its employees and customers. But if someone founds a bad charity in global health, it might lead to extremely severe suffering or death, and if someone founds a bad AI safety startup, it might dramatically accelerate massive harms, possibly even the end of humanity. So I see that having thousands of new startups would help to deploy the upcoming cash but it's far from obvious that that would improve the state of the world (especially if the founders of these startups had zero relevant experience, which is sort of what your post implies - you wouldn't be the first person to call for people to bring a tech startup mindset to philanthropy, and there is a reason that approach hasn't exactly caught on).
So anyway, I agree very much with your post directionally, but I'm not sure how well the solutions will work.
"Build the infrastructure to make it super easy for individual funders to deploy" - Yup - I'm building this with an AI Safety funder - https://www.grantmaking.ai/
I think the speed and the measurement piece are two really interesting points here. I work at a small nonprofit that does work around how AI intersects with gender and civic life. We've had plenty of discussions with some of the existing orgs that would fall into the capital allocators bucket of your chart, and none of them are moving fast to get money out the door - which generally speaking is a big issue with philanthropy overall, the process from initial connection to funding opportunity to money landing in accounts is way too long.
On the measurement piece. I think you're absolutely right that the current emphasis on measuring impact is way too focused on quantitative measurements, and less on "squishier" qualitative measurements. This makes organizations that focus on civic engagement, community building, and other deeply human areas struggle to find funding because of the difficulty in quantifying long-term impact. Not only do we need people to outline the problems, we need a broad agreement on what success looks like, and how we'll know if we got there. Otherwise no matter how good the funding ecosystem is, the organizations who want that funding or would be poised to use it well are never going to be able to utilize it.
The fact that they make billions is foundationally wrong!
Well it's a good thing they are giving the money away, isn't it?
Should consumers not have been allowed to buy from them?