0 sats \ 2 replies \ @note_bene 27 Mar \ on: Vatalik Buterin's MASSIVE $665 Million Donation to AI Nonprofit Makes Waves AI
A lot of people are catching on to this school of thought.
Some interesting ones of note:
- MacKenzie Bezos to Social Justice Inc
- SBF to Anthropic (which possibly led to getting enough compute to make Claude3 on par with GPT4)
- Jack Dorsey to various Anti-Racist / BLM initiatives
- Dustin Moskovitz to EA
- (what else?)
Beyond just today's headlines, there seems to be a long history of the non-profit sphere being infiltrated and subverted by a progressive agenda - Ford and Rockefeller foundations are usually the go-to examples. But overall, even twenty years ago it felt like charitable giving was more centrist where something like United Way - which would fund a mix of both religious-type and social worker type approaches - was much more common than today. But maybe that's because the super rich were more traditional industrialist types, rather than today's technologist / futurist set.
What are these mega donors buying for their billions? I would speculative psychological motives as: MacKenzie wants to be liked by cool people, Dorsey and Buterin want to be principled and visionary, SBF and Moskovitz want to expand their sphere of influence.
Beyond whatever policy recommendations are promoted by FLI, I think it's worth examining what makes these nonprofits so seductive to their benefactors mindset when choosing which of the thousands of organizations that could use the money.
Off the top of my head, I do know one way and that is that they will have their kids or relatives "run" the nonprofit and make stupid high salaries and have all sorts of stuff paid for. It is a tax write-off for the rich and it makes them look like they care... just as long as people do not look at who is in charge of that nonprofit and where the money goes.
Another thing you alluded to that I think is the biggest issue that needs to be investigated is it isn't like these donations go to large established nonprofits that know what they are doing. These new ones pop up like startups get a flood of money and then end up folding years later. When you have a full-time staff of two people like FLI did and you get this type of money.... come on it's clear as day you are being bought or rewarded for puppetting ideas of the one who provided the cash.
I'm not necessarily against someone like Dorsey donating to a nonprofit that would arguably fall in his industry since I think a lot of good can be done in helping people learn about their finances but like you pointed out its not always with even remotely good intentions. I would much rather see someone like Dorsey on the board or something like that helping direct the funds because he knows where the issues are, and where the regulations are, and people would be more receptive to listening to him to actually help the people.
Kinda like if Warren Buffet with Kraft (I think he still owns a lion's share of it) made a huge donation of food. He/his people would be extremely well equipped to get food to where it needed to go as fast as possible.
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Agree 100%. Why can't there by an e/acc charity that takes in a billion? What isn't there an e/acc channel on stacker news?!
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