For San Francisco-based billionaire Cari Tuna, the most important decision a philanthropist can make is deciding what cause to support. Starting Tuesday, the organization she helped found will offer help to other major donors making those choices.
Tuna, 40, and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz, 41, first seriously started in philanthropy in 2010, when Tuna quit her job as a journalist and set out to give away most of their wealth, which Moskovitz initially
made as a cofounder of Facebook. But as she spoke with people in the philanthropic ecosystem, Tuna said she found few others who took a rigorous approach to the question that drove her and her husband: How do you use your giving to do the most good for the most people?
Instead, she was often advised to follow her passions, to give to causes that she felt connected to. In an interview with The Associated Press, Tuna said she understood that as a valid approach, but if all major donors adopted it, “Philanthropy will be missing some of the biggest opportunities to help others, especially the most disadvantaged people.”
So, they started their own research organization, Open Philanthropy, which has directed their giving ever since — more than $4 billion to support global health, animal rights, the safety of artificial intelligence and the effective altruism community, among other areas.
Now, Open Philanthropy, under the new name Coefficient Giving, will offer free advice to anyone looking to donate significant amounts of money. It's a move that formalizes and expands the advising work they started over the past two years, with outside donors giving more than $300 million mostly toward global health causes recommended by Open Philanthropy. With Tuesday's announcement, they hope more donors can benefit from their research and expertise.
“It’s always been a vision of mine to create a resource that could support not just Dustin and me, but many donors looking for advice on how to do as much good as they can with their giving,” said Tuna.
While there is no firm minimum amount, Coefficient Giving will focus on advising major donors, said CEO Alexander Berger, especially those who are willing to invest in more complicated or harder to explain areas.
“We’re trying to offer something that’s a little bit more opinionated about where there are high impact opportunities that a dollar can go especially far,” Berger said, in contrast to other philanthropic consultants. Coefficient Giving is incorporated as a limited liability company that also has several affiliated tax-exempt nonprofit groups.
“They tend to be individual philanthropists with some big visions of what they can do philanthropically, but not necessarily looking to build out a whole foundation or a big team,” said Liz Givens, director of partnerships, about the kinds of donors that have partnered with Coefficient Giving.
Anna McKelvey, who makes grants through The Alpha Epsilon Fund, was one of those funders who joined an effort to decrease exposure to lead in low- and middle-income countries that Open Philanthropy championed. She and her husband, Jim McKelvey, who cofounded the payment company Square, give primarily through funding collaboratives because, she said, “We don’t have to compete for that talent. We don’t have to reinvent any wheels. We don’t do double work.”
While Open Philanthropy has given the most money to global health-related causes, it's also been a major supporter of the effective altruism community and of a certain approach to artificial intelligence technologies.
Effective altruism is a social and philanthropic movement of people who say they seek to maximize the good they can do in the world. It draws from the utilitarian ideas and ethical arguments of the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, among others, and has found supporters at elite universities and in Silicon Valley.
Beyond their funding for community events and organizations that support effective altruism, Open Philanthropy has contributed important ideas back to the community, like the framework they developed to select causes. Their approach is to identify areas that are important, neglected and where traction or progress is possible.
While there is much debate within the effective altruism community over priorities, altogether it favors saving lives over other kinds of social change that donors often support. For example, many would argue for funding malaria prevention over giving to a local food bank in the U.S. For many years, the community viewed efforts to combat climate change as a bad bet and most do not see initiatives to push back against authoritarianism or racism as the best way to spend charitable dollars.
Tuna said most of their funding partners are not part of the effective altruism community.
“There isn’t one right answer about how to do the most good,” she said. “And yet, I think it’s so important to grapple the question of how can we have an outsized impact with our giving.”
Another idea within effective altruism comes from the premise that it's worth spending resources now to reduce suffering for people in the future. From this premise, advocates argue for supporting things like preparing for pandemics, reducing the risk of nuclear war and guiding the development of artificial intelligence to be safe for humans, or AI safety for short.
Open Philanthropy was an early backer of AI safety and has given more than $580 million toward building a field of researchers studying the potential catastrophic risks of AI. As part of that, in 2017, they gave $30 million to OpenAI, then a little-known nonprofit research lab.
In a 2024 blog post, Berger, Open Philanthropy's CEO, celebrated the influence that their AI grantees had on shaping the policy response to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI. Without their efforts, he wrote, "I think that fewer people with AI experience would have been positioned to help, and policymakers would have been slower to act.”
Coefficient Giving will continue to focus the bulk of its AI work on what it considers to be the biggest risks from these technologies, like an autonomous system that might design a new deadly pathogen.
Tuna said issues like bias and job disruption deserve attention but as a funder, “We believe our comparative advantage lies in helping ensure the safe and beneficial development of increasingly capable AI systems."
That's even as the impacts of AI have gone from potential to very tangible in just a few short years and before the technologies have reached what proponents hope will be better than human intelligence.
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