Rob Wiblin

It's what we do.

But I had always been sort of drawn away by like deeper intellectual projects.

So even though I like always vaguely had the thought that I should do grant making, it never really happened for me.

Until actually, I think the thing that pushed me headfirst into grant making was the FTX collapse.

So actually, sorry, my first grant must have been in 22 instead of 23.

Because at that point, there were hundreds and hundreds of people who had been promised grants by the FTX Foundation where their grant wasn't going to go through or they were worried it was going to be clawed back or it was partially not going through.

An open fill sort of put out this emergency call for proposals for people who had been affected by the crash.

And I had I had some like thoughts and takes on technical research and also just the organization needed help, like surge capacity for for this like sort of emergency influx of grant making.

So in the in a matter of like.

maybe six weeks or so, I made like 50 different grants after not having made like any grants at all.

And that was that was a really interesting experience.

And I discovered I like there were elements of it I really liked.

But there were also there's just like something about the way you made grants where you just really couldn't.

dig into any particular thing very much, especially in the context of something like the FTX emergency, you just had to be like making these decisions really quickly.

But, but I felt like, um, I had thoughts about how grant making could be done with like more, at least in the technical AI safety space could be done with like more inside view justification for the like research directions we were funding than we had previously.

Um, and so in.

Early, mid-2023, I sort of tried to go down that path.

Yeah.

So I was focused on grants to technical researchers.

So these are often often academics, sometimes safety nonprofits.