Thank you very much for writing this! We've integrated Pangram into Manifund, as a flag and visibility filter on projects; on net it's been very helpful due to the volume of low-quality AI submissions we get through the site. However, I am sympathetic eg to your example of a non-native speaker using AI to get their points across. Recently, I had a back and forth with a Chinese-speaking student on Manifund who started with an AI writing proposal which put me off, but I eventually decided to give him a small grant after more dialogue.

I appreciate your headline statement that Pangram's 99.9% accuracy is overstated as well, that was a useful update.

(Disclaimer, I've also recently made a minor ($10k) personal investment into Pangram.)

Thanks again for writing this, Chris. I'm revisiting this essay right now as part of a reading group my colleague @Jen baik is hosting, so wanted to take the chance to write some reflections:

• In general, I think all 5 strands make sense: mass outreach, online community, conference, AIS fundamentals, advising. Overall, "more dakka" seems great. If Mox had more money, we could easily turn up the dial on making these things happen. But beyond this:
• I feel like these approaches are still more generic for general AIS/EA fieldbuilding, but the shape of fieldbuilding for SF might be particularly different, because a lot of the people you care about reaching are very busy, have high opportunity costs. They're Anthropic or OpenAI employees, or maybe city staffers and policy people
• Again, the events scene in SF is quite competitive -- a lot of excellent parties and socials and talks and mixers and conference bid for people's time. It's relatively easy to get any 100 people to show up for a talk, but requires more thinking to get the most relevant 100 people.
• I have no idea what's up with the SF AI policy scene. Surely not all these people hang out in DC. Maybe they're in CAIS? (Maybe they're all in Berkeley)
• Effective giving and philanthropy, currently, seem quite underserved in SF. Both for the EA-pilled lab employees, and also for sth like "tech CEO who's taken founder's pledge", and a much broader, good ol' fashioned earning-to-give folks -- they seem almost forgotten in the mad rush to have everyone upskill in AIS and/or court the Anthropic $
• Also, AI safety founders seem underserved. People keep saying this should be Mox's competitive advantage, and, maybe it should, but it's a bit hard to figure out what specific for-profits seem well positioned to do AI safety stuff. I think Geoff Ralston's Safe AI Fund has mostly pivoted to biosec for this reason? And other AI safety adjacent VCs I know are closing up shop.
• Beyond AI safety, emerging tech (biotech/biosec, robotics, fusion etc) seem to do well in SF.
• You touch on it already but I also still don't know what the balance between "AI safety" and "EA overall" fieldbuilding we should invest into. I'm a big tent kinda guy, I guess. 

"GiveWell for AI safety" is a subject I've discussed a lot for Manifund and have tried to do very very very briefly (see https://manifund.substack.com/p/how-cost-effective-are-ai-safety)

I would love to do more of this ourselves (or, fund someone to do this), but as you mention the talent required for it is scarce. I wish, to start, that CG would just publish their own internal analyses about their $10m+ grants, because I expect they spend a fair amount of their own grantmaker time creating those botecs, and having them published would be so much better than nothing.

Thanks! Cool to see Kaya's data; I've always been proud of pushing Manifold to make its stats page public as well

Can you say more about regulatory hazards in global health, and/or give an example? I'm imagining something like "you publish what you did in a developing country, then the regime changes, and then they notice you did a bunch of things they don't like, and put you in jail"

Thank you for the work you do at AIM; it's long been one of my favorite charities. At our wedding, my wife and I each picked a charity for attendees to donate to in lieu of a wedding gift; my wife picked The Humane League, and I picked the then-Charity Entrepreneurship, now AIM. AIM has also been one of the inspirations for the incubator I now organize, Surplus. Best wishes going forward.

Grace, thank you for the work that you do at EA Australia, and at GWWC previously. I still have fond memories of the EAG talk you gave about the importance of marketing for EA, a subject that I think many people still underrate. And while I haven't been to Australia myself, again and again I'm impressed by the quality of the impactful work and people, from the land down under; keep it up.

You already mentioned, but I think it's worth repeating -- in my view, the best startups do not take the YC deal anymore. I think partly it's because YC is a victim of its own success (the startup ecosystem is now much more developed, and other incubators and VCs bid at higher valuations); partly, the brand has fallen somewhat. Also, my guess is that a lot of the best people who would have used to start a startup, now join/start a lab, or sometimes, a nonprofit.

Some startups (and I presume, their incubators) do achieve extraordinary growth due to AI, though. One example is Cursor -- a VC recently asked "on a ROI basis, which would it have been better to seed invest into, Anthropic or Cursor?", and the answer was actually Cursor due to its rapidity of growth + fast acquisition. (And, the incubators such as https://aigrant.com/ are a inspiration for me when thinking about https://surplus.dev/)

Thank you, Zach. I appreciate you speaking up in public on behalf of CEA; CEA and your leadership is particularly important at times of high stress and uncertainty. I think the actions CEA are taking are entirely reasonable.

I also want to note for the general public, that Manifund has been but a minor player within the larger EA ecosystem, on many dimensions. (Quick estimates: Manifund moved ~$10m in a year when EA moved $1-10B; has 2 FTE in a year when EA has 1000-10,000 FTE. I think we were more impressive as a share of seed-stage AI safety projects funded, but, still not even the biggest funder in that space.) We did not expect this hiring decision to represent all of EA, and I appreciate anyone who pushes back on that narrative.

I hope that someday, I, Caroline, and/or Manifund will be able to regain CEA's trust through our actions. Until then, I wish you the best with your work, and apologize for making your lives harder.

I think I can share that the $500k was a grant (not investment) from the Future Fund, to fund a program where successful Manifold traders could choose which charities would receive donations: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mbBfFHKEDBTwTSSJX/predicting-for-good-charity-prediction-markets

Manifund ran this program for ~2 years and distributed most of this funding to charities & charitable projects, with the top 3 being Givewell (~$61k), LTFF (~$38k), Rethink Priorities (~$27k). We offered to return remaining funds to the estate; we are still in litigation. This case has been going on for years, and may continue for months at least; litigation takes a while. I do hope to write a retro on this overall program someday.

For reference, Lightcone received ~$4.2m from FTX Future Fund and eventually returned ~$1.7m (and then paid some more in legal fees, maybe ~$0.6m): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc/the-lightcone-is-nothing-without-its-people

Ah, to be clear, I don't wish to take particularly much credit for his outlook change (though, I do believe he eg somewhat reconsidered his outlook on trans people after meeting a trans person at Manifest. I also believe he did meet some EAs which he collaborated more with afterwards); mostly I cite it as an example of prescience