“Donating 80% While It Still Counts” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

About this episode

Jeff Kaufman discusses the urgency of donating during a critical window for AI development and the changes in their donation strategy over the years.

Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: We've been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it feels very different now because of the AI boom. Some of this is that people who've made money in the boom will likely be giving more soon, and so money spent now can help set up organizations to spend future money more effectively. But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly, for better or worse. We want to push hard for "better". If you compare to previous years (2024, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), we're donating a lot less than we used to in absolute terms: Until mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, optimizing to maximize donations, and now I'm at a non-profit. This means we're giving a larger fraction, but of [...] --- Outline: (04:07) Evaluating Predictions (06:14) Making New Predictions (08:11) Details --- First…

People in this episode

Host: EA Forum Team

Guest: Jeff Kaufman

Topics covered

• effective altruism
• AI impact
• donation strategies
• philanthropy
• financial decisions
• societal change

Keywords

• donation
• AI
• effective altruism
• philanthropy
• financial strategy
• impact
• charity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EA Forum Team

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