Lisa Shu

In my inaugural Substack post, I explore the role of philanthropy in promoting AI moonshots. Although the private sector will invest in many AI applications, philanthropy can play a critical role in harnessing AI to accelerate the development of vaccines for diseases of the poor, climate-resilient crops, and safe replacements for “forever” chemicals. Philanthropists can have an enormous impact by supporting the “public goods” for these applications, such as open datasets and well-designed benchmarks. I am very excited by the partnerships that @RenPhilanthropy has with philanthropists to use AI to double the rate of student learning outcomes in middle school math, expand access to benefits for low-income families, fight climate change, develop targeted cancer therapies, and transform fundamental math. Link in the reply.

People who can make ideas legible are still in demand. They're going to be able to direct philanthropic capital in powerful ways. More people should be writing; not less. You shouldn't be demoralized by AI getting better and better at writing. There's still room for taste, and there's still a need for people who can sit down with scientists, listen to their nebulous ideas, and then sharpen them into a clear and compelling story. Those ideas can be used to raise philanthropic capital for scientific programs. We're going to see more and more of this. Philanthropists are going to fund the ideas that are written down and clearly described. Most ideas are not even written down or, if they are, not taken seriously until they're at least packaged as a PDF with some kind of institutional logo attached. (This is, alas, how the world works.) Writers with large audiences have been raising funds for a long time. Packy McCormick raised a venture fund at Not Boring, as did Mario Gabriele at The Generalist. Now we'll see more of this at the philanthropic level, too. We did this a lot at Asimov Press, though mostly by accident. We published several articles that later became the basis for large philanthropic programs or standalone nonprofits. The articles weren’t intended to necessarily do that, but serendipitous outcomes emerge when you take editing and legibility of ideas seriously. Now there is a need for writers who can source the ideas —> apply their taste —> make the ideas legible —> AND do the final steps of convening workshops, troubleshooting the ideas, and getting them in front of funders. Ruxandra Teslo has been doing a great job of this with clinical trials. This is all related to Nan Ransohoff’s recent piece on "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy," of course. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and want to do useful things in my life. Writing often feels “low status;” I engage with an idea for a week or two and then move on. Now I’d like to push a little bit harder on a handful of ideas each year, and actually try to stand them up in the world. Please reach out if you’d like to work together.

Launching today: Formal Frontier from the Mathlib Initiative, a program of @RenPhilanthropy and funded by @xtxmarkets. Formal Frontier will focus on responsible, scalable, and open-source AI-driven autoformalization of mathematics. Read more and learn how to get involved: mathlib-initiative.org/forma…

I am excited that @RenPhilanthropy is partnering with Google.org on the #GoogleOrgImpactChallenge: AI for Science! This is a global open-call for teams using AI for breakthroughs in sustainability, climate resilience, and life sciences. → g.co/impactchallenge/aisci