Zvi said:

Unconditional Grants to Worthy Individuals Are Great

The process of applying for grants, raising money, and justifying your existence sucks.

A lot.

It especially sucks for many of the creatives and nerds that do a lot of the best work.

If you have to periodically go through this process, and are forced to continuously worry about making your work legible and how others will judge it, that will substantially hurt your true productivity. At best it is a constant distraction. By default, it is a severe warping effect. A version of this phenomenon is doing huge damage to academic science.

Compelled by this, I'm considering funding ~three people for two years each to work on whatever they see fit, much like the the Thiel Fellowship, but with an AI Alignment angle.

I want to find people who are excited to work on existential risk, but are currently spending much of their time working on something else due to financial reasons.

Instead of delegating the choice to some set of grant makers, I think that aggregating the opinion of the crowd could work better (at least as good at finding talent, but with less overall time spent)

[...]

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First published:

December 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kCnwovXFHoqu5DvN2/alignment-fellowship

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.