Today we are announcing a competition with prizes ranging from $15k to $1.5M for work that informs the Future Fund’s fundamental assumptions about the future of AI, or is informative to a panel of superforecaster judges. These prizes will be open for three months—until Dec 23—after which we may change or discontinue them at our discretion. We have two reasons for launching these prizes. First, we hope to expose our assumptions about the future of AI to intense external scrutiny and improve them. We think artificial intelligence (AI) is the development most likely to dramatically alter the traj ..read more

Some outstanding projects could scale up to productively deploying tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. We’ll call these massively scalable projects.  Tech startups start small and then rapidly scale. We’d like to see that in philanthropy, too. GiveDirectly is a model example in global development. But we’re currently short on massively scalable projects that address our areas of interest. We want to change that. We’ll try to seed lots of promising new projects, and then help the best ones scale quickly.  We’re not sure what the best ideas are. But we’re excited about pr ..read more

Summary Background The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund publicly launched in late February. We’re a philanthropic fund that makes grants and investments to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. For information about some of the areas we’ve been funding, see our Areas of Interest page.  This is our first public update on the Future Fund’s grantmaking. The purpose of this post is to give an update on what we’ve done and what we’re learning about the funding models we’re testing. (It does not cover a range of other FTX Foundation activities.) We’ve also published a new grants page and regrants ..read more

We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.  We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spen ..read more

Our regranting program will offer discretionary budgets to independent part-time grantmakers, to be spent in the next ~6 months. Budgets will typically be in the $250k-few million range. We’ve already invited a first cohort of 21 regrantors to test the program. Large funders aren’t always aware of the best opportunities. We want to try a decentralized approach. We hope to empower a range of interesting, ambitious, and altruistic people to drive funding decisions through a rewarding, low-friction process.  We are just getting started and we’d like to fund a lot of great projects. So our pr ..read more

We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.  We’re now announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to this longlist. If you submit an idea, and we like it enough to add to the website, we’ll pay you a prize of $5,000 (or more in exceptional cases). We’ll also attribute the idea to you on the website (unless you prefer to be anonymous).  All submissions must be received in the next week, i.e. by Monday, March 7, 2022.  We are excited about this prize for two main reasons: We would love to add great ideas to our list of projects. We are excited ab ..read more

For people who want to follow our work closely, here is some more on our initial focus and priorities.  We are just getting started and we’d like to fund a lot of great projects quickly. So our primary goal for 2022 is to perform bold and decisive tests of highly scalable funding models. We think this is important for helping us make the most of our resources.  The initial strategies we’re testing are highly decentralized: The first strategy is to simply describe very clearly a broad range of projects we’d be excited to fund, and offer open applications for funding. We’re hoping thi ..read more

Some outstanding projects could scale up to productively deploying tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. We’ll call these massively scalable projects.  Tech startups start small and then rapidly scale. We’d like to see that in philanthropy, too. GiveDirectly is a model example in global development. But we’re currently short on massively scalable projects that address our areas of interest. We want to change that. We’ll try to seed lots of promising new projects, and then help the best ones scale quickly.  We’re not sure what the best ideas are. But we’re excited about pr ..read more