Austin & Oli on funding and incubating projects

On LessWrong, AI safety funding experts Austin Chen and Oliver Habryka discussed structural problems in how philanthropic money flows to research and projects. Habryka argued that many donors struggle with what he called a trust bottleneck—they're reluctant to delegate wealth to institutions without deep personal relationships with leadership. He's developing an improved funding platform called the S-Process to reduce this dependency on trust. Meanwhile, Chen launched Surplus, an incubator for effective altruism and AI safety software projects, focusing on tools for better reasoning, public education about AI policy, and infrastructure for the nonprofit ecosystem. The pair also critiqued existing funding institutions for being either too risk-averse or too opaque, and debated whether talented individuals should focus on direct work or building the meta-infrastructure that enables others to do the work.

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