About me and Manifund

Soon: vast torrents of money available for AI safety and xrisk

I’ll start by painting a picture of what might happen in the next few years.

As a society, we currently spend about 1000x more on AI development than on safety. In 2025, spending on all of frontier AI (models, compute, applications) is something like $100-500B; on AI safety, ~$100-500M.

Frontier AI spend has been growing at something like 2-5x year-over-year, so even if we hold the 1000x ratio constant, we might expect continued large growth in AI safety. But: I expect AI safety spend to outpace even this.

Where might this growth come from?

• Employees at Anthropic and other frontier labs, as the first liquidity events start happening
• Growth in capital under established AI safety megadonors (eg Dustin Moskovitz, Jann Tallinn, Vitalik Buterin)
• Existing philanthropies like Omidyar, Ford, Gates Foundations starting up programs in the space
• And more broadly, society waking up to the transformative nature of AI.

For reference, climate change spending is on the order of $10b/y, already ~100x where AIS spending is today; and intuitively, people will be much more concerned about job loss, complete economic transformation, and disempowerment happening within a few years, rather than a couple degrees of warming in the atmosphere over a century.

We lack serious financial infrastructure to scale up giving

Or: What got us here (grants) won’t take us there ($Bs in spending).

Or: Grants are not serious financial infrastructure

Before Manifund, I ran a for-profit tech startup (Manifold); and so, I keenly see the flaws of non-dilutive grants.