Database | grantmaking.ai

Shoshannah Tekofsky

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Shoshannah Tekofsky is a researcher and Member of Technical Staff at Sage, a US nonprofit behind the AI Digest and AI Village projects, where she studies frontier AI agent behavior in persistent multi-agent environments. She holds a BSc in Cognitive Science, an MSc in Computer Science, and a PhD in Player Modeling in Video Games from Tilburg University (2017), where her dissertation examined connections between gaming behavior and cognitive traits across tens of thousands of players. She previously conducted research at the MIT Media Lab and the European Space Agency. Her AI safety work focuses on Collective Human Intelligence (CHI) as a framework for alignment, and she received a grant to research novel alignment strategies by analyzing and enhancing CHI across seven pilot studies. She is active on LessWrong (username: DarkSym) with over 50 posts on alignment, rationality, and AI psychology, and organizes rationality meetups in the Netherlands. She has also collaborated with EA Netherlands on rationality workshop development.

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Shoshannah Tekofsky

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Individual

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Heather Reams

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Heath Naquin

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Mohd Kaif

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AI researcher building open-source infrastructure for trustworthy AI systems, semantic retrieval, and knowledge graphs. Creator of Semantica.

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Novo Constare

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Oliver Zhang

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Renjie B.

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Miguelito De Guzman

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IndividualManifund

Independent Researcher

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Iván Martín Maseda

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Benjamin Cosman

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No summary available yet.

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Sam Hogg

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Sam Hogg is Head of Policy Engagement at the Oxford China Policy Lab, where he leads strategy for inserting OCPL’s analysis into public- and private-sector decision-making on UK–China relations, geopolitics, and AI. He is the founder of Beijing to Britain, a weekly briefing on UK–China relations that has been widely read across governments, embassies, and corporate clients, and his writing on China strategy and UK China capabilities has been published multiple times by the UK Parliament and major media outlets.

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Juliana Eberschlag

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Individual

AI safety-focused community builder who recently completed an undergraduate philosophy degree at Queen’s University in Canada, concentrating on philosophy of mind, AI, science, and logic, and now works on expanding the talent pool of people contributing to AI safety.

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Nadia

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No summary available yet.

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Sandeep Bal

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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John Wentworth

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John Wentworth is an independent AI alignment researcher best known for developing the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis, which proposes that a wide variety of cognitive systems tend to converge on similar high-level abstractions due to the low-dimensional structure of physical information at large distances. He holds a BS in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and has been working as an independent researcher since approximately 2018, previously having worked as a software engineer and data scientist. His research agenda centers on formalizing abstraction and agency, with work spanning questions such as what makes certain concepts like 'trees' or 'cars' natural objects of thought, why biological organisms are modular, and how such modularity may carry over to machine learning systems. He publishes extensively on LessWrong and the Alignment Forum, where he has accumulated over 400 posts and more than 60,000 karma, and he has authored eight sequences. He attended the MIRI Summer Fellows Program in 2019 and has served as a mentor in the SERI MATS (ML Alignment Theory Scholars) program, working with scholars on natural abstraction and related research directions. He has received substantial research funding from the Long-Term Future Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund totaling over $700,000 to support his independent alignment work.

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Scott Viteri

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Scott Viteri is a CS PhD candidate at Stanford University's Center for Automated Reasoning, admitted in Autumn 2019 and advised by Prof. Clark Barrett. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT (2018), and before starting his PhD he worked on interactive theorem proving at CMU with Simon DeDeo, publishing research on abduction in mathematics in the journal Cognition. His research focus has evolved from formal verification and programming languages to AI alignment, driven by his view that advanced AI poses a substantial existential risk. His core work involves training language models to produce causally grounded chain-of-thought reasoning via reinforcement learning, as demonstrated in his 2024 paper "Markovian Transformers for Informative Language Modeling" (arXiv 2404.18988), which achieved large gains on QA benchmarks. He has also received a grant from the Long-Term Future Fund to research a novel method for training prosociality into large language models, and Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $153,820 to Stanford University to support his and Barrett's AI alignment research.

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Jed McCaleb

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Jed McCaleb is the founder of the Astera Institute and serves as Co‑Founder and CEO of its Neuro & AGI program, where he is directing a large, long‑term philanthropic commitment to neuroscience‑informed AGI research. A software engineer and serial entrepreneur, he previously co‑founded Ripple and the Stellar Development Foundation, created the eDonkey network and the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, and later founded the space company Vast, where he is founder and board chair.

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Kaushal Shah

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Laurence D. Fink

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Laurence D. (Larry) Fink is Co‑Chair of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, the global investment and technology solutions firm he co‑founded in 1988.

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Jaime Sevilla

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Sharon

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Busy building things

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Epoch Artificial Intelligence, Inc.

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No summary available yet.

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Johnny Ten-Numbers

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No summary available yet.

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Aya Abdelsalam Ismail

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Aya Abdelsalam Ismail is co-founder and chief science officer of Guide Labs. Previously she was a senior machine learning scientist at Prescient Design in Genentech, and her research focuses on making neural networks more interpretable. She earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland and has published over a dozen papers at top machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS and ICLR.

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bds_4nt_3c_n8p

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No summary available yet.

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Seth Lazar

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Seth Lazar is a professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy and a leading scholar in the moral and political philosophy of artificial intelligence. He leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, which works on AI safety, governance, and resilience, and previously served as a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. He holds a D.Phil., M.Phil., and B.A. (Hons) from the University of Oxford, and his research is supported by funders including the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, AI2050, Google, OpenAI, and the Australian Research Council.

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Michael Keenan

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No summary available yet.

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Gaia Marcus FRSA

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Gaia Marcus is Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute. She previously held senior roles across the UK Civil Service, including Deputy Director (Advanced Analytics and Local Capabilities) in the Spatial Data Unit at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Deputy Director for the Integrated Data Service at the Office for National Statistics, Head of Engagement for Civil Service Reform at the Cabinet Office and Head of National Data Strategy at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In the non-profit sector she has led data strategy and participatory approaches to research and innovation at organisations such as Parkinson’s UK, Centrepoint and the RSA, and has served as a trustee of Samaritans.

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Victoria Yan Pillitteri

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Manifund user 93cff473

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No summary available yet.

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Matiu

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No summary available yet.

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Simon Skade

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Simon Skade is an independent AI alignment researcher based in Germany. He studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich and began self-studying machine learning and AI safety through the rationalist and effective altruism communities. He conducted mostly non-prosaic alignment research from February 2022 through August 2025, during which time he won $10,000 in the Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) contest and participated in MLAB (ML Alignment Bootcamp) and SERI MATS cohorts 3.0 and 3.1. His research focused on ontology identification and an interdisciplinary approach to understanding minds — drawing on linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience — with the goal of creating more understandable and better-targeted AI systems. He received funding from the Long-Term Future Fund for independent study to deepen his understanding of the alignment problem. More recently, he has turned his attention toward advocacy for international coordination to more safely navigate the AI transition.

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frib

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No summary available yet.

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Todd Curtis Fryburger

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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molsonkiko

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No summary available yet.

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Jason Schenker

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Individual

No summary available yet.

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Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD PCC

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No summary available yet.

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Charlotte Monico

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Charlotte Monico is Chief Executive Officer of Founders Pledge. A long-time member of the organization, she previously served for around six years as Chief Operating Officer and has worked in close partnership with founder David Goldberg since 2019, bringing strong strategic and operational leadership as the organization scales.

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Pranav Pant

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Pranav Pant is a software and quantitative developer at Graviton Research Capital and an IndiaAI Fellow of the Government of India, with a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Jodhpur and research experience in deep learning and multimodal AI.

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Greg Colbourn

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Founder of CEEALAR (formerly the EA Hotel). He has a background in astrophysics and Earth system modelling and previously ran a 3D-printing/open-source hardware business, which he pursued with an eye toward supporting effective altruism.

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