Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report.
- Lightcone Infrastructure is here. They operate LessWrong and the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley but list no physical assets; someone on Reddit says that they let fellow travelers like Scott Alexander use their old rented office for free. “We are a registered 501(c)3 and are IMO the best bet you have for converting money into good futures for humanity.” They also published a book and website with common-sense, data-based advice for Democratic Party leaders which I am sure fills a gap in the literature. https://decidingtowin.org/
- CFAR is here. They seem to own the campus in Berkeley (“Land, buildings, and equipment … less depreciation; $22,026,042”). I don’t know what else they do since they stopped teaching rationality workshops in 2016 or so and pivoted to worrying about building Colossus.
- MIRI is here. They pay Yud ($599,970 in 2024!) and after failing to publish much research on how to build Friend Computer they pivoted to arguing that Friend Computer might not be our friend. Edit: they had about $16 million in mostly financial assets (cash, investments, etc.) at end of year but spent $6.5m against $1.5m of revenue in 2024. Since 2021 they have been consuming a $25 million donation they received that year.
- BEMC Foundation is here. This husband-and-wife organization gives about $2 million/year each to Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell out of tens of millions of dollars in capital.
- The Clear Fund (GiveWell) is here. They have the biggest wad of cash and the highest cashflow.
- Edit: Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) is here (they have two sister organizations). David Gerard says they are mainly a way for Dustin Moskevitz the co-founder of Facebook to organize donations, like the Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations. They used to fund Lightcone.
- Edit: Animal Charity Evaluators is here. They have funded Vox Future Perfect (in 2020-2021) and the longtermist kind of animal welfare (“if humans eating pigs is bad, isn’t whales eating krill worse?”)
- Edit: Survival and Flourishing Fund does not seem to be a charity. Whereas a Lightcone staffer says that SFF funds Lightcone, SFF say that they just connect applicants to donors and evaluate grant applications. So who exactly is providing the money? Sometimes its Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa.
- Centre for Effective Altruism is mostly British but has a US wing since March 2025 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/333737390
- Edit: Giving What We Can seems like a mainstream “bednets and deworming pills” type of charity
- Edit: Givedirectly Inc is an excellent idea in principle (give money to poor people overseas and let them figure out how best to use it) but their auditor flagged them for Material noncompliance and Material weakness in internal controls. The mistakes don’t seem sinister (they classified $39 million of donations as conditional rather than unconditional- ie. with more restrictions than they actually had). GiveDirectly, Give What We Can, and GiveWell are all much better funded than the core LessWrong organizations.
Since CFAR seem to own Lighthaven, its curious that Lightcone head Oliver Habryka threatens to sell it if Lightcone shut down. One might almost imagine that boundaries between all these organizations are not as clear as the org charts make it seem. SFGate says that it cost $16.5 million plus renovations:
Who are these owners? The property belongs to a limited liability company called Lightcone Rose Garden, which appears to be a stand-in for the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality and its project, Lightcone Infrastructure. Both of these organizations list the address, 2740 Telegraph Ave., as their home on public filings. They’ve renovated the inn, named it Lighthaven, and now use it to host events, often related to the organizations’ work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence safety and “longtermism.”
Habryka was boasting about the campus in 2024 and said that Lightcone budgeted $6.25 million on renovating the campus that year. It also seems odd for a nonprofit to spend money renovating a property that belongs to another nonprofit.
On LessWrong Habryka also mentions “a property we (Lightcone) own right next to Lighthaven, which is worth around $1M.” Lightcone’s 2024 paperwork listed the only assets as cash and accounts receivable. So either they are passing around assets like the last plastic cup at a frat party, or they bought this recently while the dispute with the trustees was ongoing, or Habryka does not know what his organization actually owns.
The California end seems to be burning money, as many movements with apocalyptic messages and inexperienced managers do. Revenue was significantly less than expenses and assets of CFAR are close to liabilities. CFAR/Lightcone do not have the $4.9 million liquid assets which the FTX trustees want back and claim their escrow company lost another $1 million of FTX’s money.
It appears that MIRI had an inflection point in 2019 when they grew from a $3.6m / yr organization to a $6 million / yr. In 2021 they received $25 million in donations and they have been burning that ever since. They received $15.6m in crypto from one anonymous donor and $4.4m in crypto from Vitalik Buterin of Etherium in 2021. Since then they report $1.6m to $1.9m / year of donations, and their December 2025 fundraiser aimed at $6 million and has reached $1.2 million (half of that a match from Survival and Flourishing Fund ie. probably another tech exec or crypto gambler). So MIRI depends on a few rich donors and could not survive in its present form from ordinary rationalists chipping in.
MIRI and Lightcone have unusual calls for donations at the same time. That seems like poor coordination but operations are not our friends’ strength.
Their executive compensation exploded from $1.3m to $3.1m in 2024. Their other activities were giving out $280k in grants and spending $34k on a conference. What are they doing with all that money? You don’t need $3.1m to write a trade book and get on some podcasts. And they plan to spend faster next year:
Going into 2026, our budget projections have a median of $8M, assuming some growth and large projects, with large error bars from uncertainty about the amount of growth and projects. On the upper end of our projections, our expenses would hit upwards of $10M/yr.
$599,970!?
That is almost triple our prime minster gets.
Also more than the president of the US.
Guy gets “instantly solve most of my life’s problems” amount of money just for posting badly, jfc
I’ve noted on Reddit sneerclub previously that this is not an outrageous sort of amount for a Bay Area nonprofit to pay a C-level or a high level specialist. We might look and go “he’s a high level specialist in dumb nonsense”, but it’s not a facially outrageous number. Those region 2 DVDs aren’t going to buy themselves, you know.
Still, it merits pointing out that this explicitly isn’t happening because the private sector is clamoring to get some of that EY expertise on nothing the moment he’s available, but because MIRI is for all intents and purposes a gravy train for a small set of mutual acquaintances who occasionally have a board meeting to decide how much they’ll get paid that year.
transcription
The way it actually works is that I’m on the critical path for our organizational mission, and paying me less would require me to do things that take up time and energy in order to get by with a smaller income. Then, assuming all goes well, future intergalactic civilizations would look back and think this was incredibly stupid; in much the same way that letting billions of person-containing brains rot in graves, and humanity allocating less than a million dollars per year to the Singularity Institute, would predictably look pretty stupid in retrospect. At Singularity Institute board meetings we at least try not to do things which will predictably make future intergalactic civilizations think we were being willfully stupid. That’s all there is to it, and no more.
This is from back when MIRI, then Singularity Institute, was paying him like $120K/y – https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qqhdj3W3vSfB5E9ss/siai-an-examination?commentId=4wo4bD9kkA22K5exH#4wo4bD9kkA22K5exH
this explicitly isn’t happening because the private sector is clamoring to get some of that EY expertise
I mean, Peter Thiel might like him to bend the knee and I’m sure OpenAI/Anthropic would love to have him as a shill, idk if they’d actually pay 600K for it. Also it would be a betrayal of every belief about AI Eliezer claims to have, so in principle it really shouldn’t take lucrative compensation to keep him from it.
paying me less would require me to do things that take up time and energy in order to get by with a smaller income
Well… it is an improvement on cults making their members act as the leader’s servants/slaves because the leader’s time/effort is allegedly so valuable!
A downvoted reply:
That is rather peculiar reasoning to hear from you. You seem to be acting with a level of self-importance that would only be justified if there will be some future being that will torture trans-Singularity trans-humans for not having done enough to accelerate the onset of the Singularity.
And that’s just stupid.
I went deep into the Yud lore once. A single fluke SAT score served as the basis for Yud’s belief in his own world-changing importance. In middle school, he took an SAT with a score of 670 verbal and 740 math (maximum 800 each) and the Midwest Talent Search contacted him to tell him that his scores were very high for a middle schooler. Despite his great pains to talk about how he tried to be humble about it, he also says that he was in the “99.9998th percentile” and “not only bright but waayy out of the ordinary.”
I was in the math contest scene. I have good friends who did well on AP Calculus in middle school, and were skilled enough at contests that they would have easily gotten an 800 on the math SAT if they took it. Even so, there were middle schoolers who were far more skilled than them, and I have seen other people who were far less “talented” in middle school rise to great heights later in life. As it turns out, skills can be developed through practice.
Yud’s performance would not even be considered impressive in the math contest community, let alone justify calling him one of the most important people in the world. Perhaps at the time, he didn’t know better. But he decided to make this a core part of his self-identity. His life quickly spiraled out of control, starting with him refusing to attend high school.
I’m in the wrong racket
Plus $12,018 in “other reportable compensation.” You could support a team of ten graduate students with that money and they would actually make things other than fanfic and publish research!
I knew that “Deciding To Win” sounded familiar.
Literally zero awareness that it is not 1993 anymore.
https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3m4bu6tyoac2t
There is also this Rationality is Systematized Winning by Eliezer Y.
(Which has the glorious line: “Reason is just a way of doing things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t”, showing he never went to university).
These guys really are just another boring cult. They’re Christian Scientists. They’re aesthetic realists.
It is how professors talk to each other in … debate halls? What the fuck? Yud really doesn’t have any clue how universities work.
I am a PhD student right now so I have a far better idea of how professors talk to each other. The way most professors (in math/CS at least) communicate in a spoken setting is through giving talks at conferences. The cool professors use chalkboards, but most people these days use slides. As it turns out, debates are really fucking stupid for scientific research for so many reasons.
- Science assumes good faith out of everyone, and debates are needlessly adversarial. This is why everyone just presents and listens to talks.
- Debates are actually really bad for the kind of deep analysis and thought needed to understand new research. If you want to seriously consider novel ideas, it’s not so easy when you’re expected to come up with a response in the next few minutes.
- Debates generally favor people who use good rhetoric and can package their ideas more neatly, not the people who really have more interesting ideas.
- If you want to justify a scientific claim, you do it with experiments and evidence (or a mathematical proof when applicable). What purpose does a debate serve?
I think Yud’s fixation on debates and “winning” reflects what he thinks of intellectualism. For him, it is merely a means to an end. The real goal is to be superior and beat up other people.
He also states: “If a hoard (sic) of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness.”
Wrong. If a horde of barbarians descends on the lecture theatre, the professor will be delighted to see so many people taking in an interest in, say, recent developments in differential calculus.
Nah they tend to just tell them to get the fuck out of the class they are disrupting, it has happened a few times now in the usa where random fasc types start to shout things and get chased off.
Wonder if the recent ‘i got my trans teacher fired for failing my paper correctly’ shit is going to shift that.
It is in fact the barbarians who bring the ‘debate hall’ with them, with the ‘change my mind’ or ‘prove me wrong’ shit.
To say it another way: We call them lecture halls, not debate halls, Yud.
From all my years in physics, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that resembles a debate as Yud seems to envision it. You might occasionally get a panel, where N participants sit on a stage and provide O(N) opinions.
Our physics department had a coffee table in the lobby piled up with the most recent batch of unsolicited kook manuscripts, which might count
The only ‘debates’ are, when after a lecture somebody goes ‘this isn’t a question, more of a comment but …’ and then half the audience groans.
Thinking that debates are the ultimate decider of who is right or wrong is like, twelve year old shit. Hence the internet debate industrial complex
I don’t think Yud had any martial-arts training when he wrote the Musashi similes either. He would have made a good novelist or science writer if he could have made himself do the work, because he can write up other people’s ideas in his own words.
Choice quote from Dave Karpf:
Policy moderation can never fail. It can only be failed.
I liked Dave Karpf’s essay on the time Melon Husk showed he was a great poker player by making a big bet, losing everything to the card-counters, and buying back in again and again until he won once.
For Americans reading this, there is probably an essay in analyzing Deciding to Win and relating it to Kelsey Piper’s flavour of neoliberal LessWronger and all the tech executives whose campaign contributions in 2024 were mostly to Democrats. Not my country so I am not reading the whole book or writing the essay.
Thanks for digging into this.
Question for someone not versed in US nonprofit law - are there any legal consequences for incorrect statmements in these forms? Or does the IRS just look at the tax situation?
Someone who really hates you can try to make trouble using the statements, but it’s mostly trying to get the IRS to pull your charitable status. But the IRS is also aware there are a lot of dumb assholes who try to make trouble. Depends if someone serious can make it stick.
The main issue is if the IRS thinks it’s a scam in charitable clothing and not a genuine charity. But I think that our friends are very sincere in their charitable purposes and generally incompetent, and the IRS is extremely used to that combination.
The Nonlinear Fund from Old!SneerClub seems to have lost their 501(c)3 status because they forgot to file. A donor might be able to sue Lightcone for deceptive advertising but if you donated enough to get anything back after you pay off the lawyers, its probably better just to stop giving like Dustin Moskovitz.
yeah. it’s important to remember that in general, charities are fucking incompetent and suing them for being useless MFs tends to do nothing useful.
In its 2024 form CFAR says that Lightcone is a “PROJECT BRAND” and “IN 2022 CFAR ACQUIRED THE ROSE GARDEN INN PROPERTY TO EXPAND ITS RESEARCH CENTER OPERATIONS.” In its 2024 form Lightcone says it donated $158,765 to the Rose Garden project. It seems that CFAR and Lightcone Rose Garden LLC are the orgs with financial trouble, so why is it Lightcone which made the emergency call for donations? Could Lightcone just give the money to another nonprofit with the same mailing address?
