Holden Karnofsky | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) |
| Occupation | Nonprofit executive |
| Known for | Co-founding GiveWell and Open Philanthropy |
| Spouse | |
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. He is a co-founder and Director of AI Strategy of the research and grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. [1] Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 and is vice chair of its board of directors.
Karnofsky graduated from Harvard University with a degree in social studies in 2003. [2] At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon . [3] After graduating, he worked at Bridgewater Associates, an investment management fund based in Westport, Connecticut. [4] [5]
At Bridgewater, Karnofsky met his future GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld. In 2006, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld started a charity club where they and other Bridgewater employees pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to. [6] In mid-2007, with donations from their colleagues, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed a fund called "The Clear Fund", and quit their jobs to work full time on GiveWell, whose goal was to allocate the money in the Clear Fund to the best charities. [6]
In June 2012, GiveWell announced a close partnership with Good Ventures, the philanthropic foundation tasked with giving away Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's wealth. Good Ventures has been one of GiveWell's main funders since then as well as a major donor to GiveWell-recommended charities. [7]
Under Karnofsky's leadership, the annual money moved to GiveWell-recommended charities increased from $1.6 million in 2010 [8] to $110 million in 2015. [9] As of 2020 [update] , he is vice chair of its board of directors. [10]
In December 2007, Karnofsky was discovered posting a question about the organization to MetaFilter using another individual's name, and then posting an answer about GiveWell with his own name but without disclosing his affiliation with GiveWell. The negative publicity led Karnofsky to resign from the role of executive director, though he was later reinstated. [11] The board cut $5000 from his salary to pay for a professional development course he would be required to take. [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] The incident had negative repercussions on GiveWell's reputation. Karnofsky's claim that the incident had been due to sleep deprivation and offer to donate to MetaFilter were mocked by users of the site. [17]
Karnofsky was CEO and then co-chief executive officer of Open Philanthropy, a research and grantmaking foundation whose main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. [18] Open Philanthropy is an outgrowth of GiveWell Labs, a collaboration of GiveWell and Good Ventures for more speculative giving. [19] [20] [21] As of August 2019, Open Philanthropy has made around 650 grants to over 370 unique organizations, disbursing a total of $857 million. [22]
In 2023, Karnofsky first took a leave of absence from his co-CEO role and then moved to a new role as Director of AI Strategy to focus on AI safety. [1] [23]
Karnofsky was on the board of directors of OpenAI between 2017 and 2021. [24] [25]
In August 2017, Karnofsky married Daniela Amodei, a former OpenAI employee who co-founded an AI company with her brother Dario Amodei called Anthropic, which has developed the chatbot Claude, an alternative to ChatGPT. [26] [24] Karnofsky and Dario were former roommates. [27] Karnofsky is ethnically Jewish. [28] [29]
Karnofsky identifies with the ideas of effective altruism and has both represented and engaged with the effective altruist community. Earlier in his career, Karnofsky said he subscribed to a consequentialist moral framework that hoped to "give people more power to live the life they want to live". In recent years, he has written about the importance of extending empathy to all beings deserving of moral consideration, even when it is unusual or seems strange to do so. [30] He believes that it is important for GiveWell to increase the racial and gender diversity of its employees, towards which the organization has taken steps. [31]
He has debated other nonprofit leaders on the importance of field visits, which he believes are important but not sufficient in evaluating the effectiveness of charitable programs. [32]
In August 2014, after the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced the end of its Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative (one of GiveWell's major early funders), Karnofsky wrote a post on the GiveWell blog offering his thoughts on the program, informed by his experience as a recipient of its largesse. [33] The Hewlett Foundation responded in a comment on the post, and Jacob Harold responded on the GuideStar blog. [34]
Karnofsky has shared his thoughts on altruistic career choice and elaborated on Open Philanthropy's approach to cause prioritization in an interview with Robert Wiblin for the 80,000 Hours podcast [35] as well as elsewhere. [36] [37] [38]
Charity Navigator is a charity assessment organization that evaluates hundreds of thousands of charitable organizations based in the United States, operating as a free 501(c)(3) organization. It provides insights into a nonprofit's financial stability, adherence to best practices for both accountability and transparency, and results reporting. It is the largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities in the United States. It does not accept any advertising or donations from the organizations it evaluates.
Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest. Various philosophies about charity exist, with frequent associations with religion.
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead.
Dustin Aaron Moskovitz is an American billionaire internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, Inc. with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. In 2008, he left Facebook to co-found Asana with Justin Rosenstein. In March 2011, Forbes reported Moskovitz to be the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, on the basis of his then 2.34% share in Facebook. As of June 2024, his net worth is estimated at US$23 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in low income areas that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone. GiveDirectly transfers funds to people in Bahamas, Bangladesh, DRC, Liberia, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, USA, and Yemen.
Good Ventures is a private foundation and philanthropic organization in San Francisco, and the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and her husband Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Good Ventures adheres to principles of effective altruism and aims to spend most or all of its money before Moskovitz and Tuna die. Good Ventures does not have any full-time staff, and instead distributes grants according to recommendations from Open Philanthropy.
The Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP) is a center at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States focused on high impact philanthropy, both in the US and internationally. The Center translates the best available evidence in areas such as education and early childhood development, disaster relief, poverty, democracy, and public health into actionable guidance and educational programs for those looking to make a difference with their giving.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement has achieved significant popularity outside of academia, spurring the creation of university-based institutes, research centers, advisory organizations and charities, which, collectively, have donated several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
Development Media International (DMI) is a non-governmental organization with both non-profit and for-profit arms that "use[s] scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-effective way".
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference is a 2015 book by William MacAskill that serves as a primer on the effective altruism movement that seeks to do the most good. It is published by Random House and was released on July 28, 2015.
Jim Greenbaum is a former telecom entrepreneur who made a fortune through his telecom company Access Long Distance, and then switched to full-time philanthropy through his foundation, the Greenbaum Foundation.
The Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative (NMI) was an initiative of the Effective Philanthropy Group of the Hewlett Foundation launched in 2006. Its closure was announced in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in April 2014.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based organisation that builds and supports the effective altruism community. It was founded in 2012 by William MacAskill and Toby Ord, both philosophers at the University of Oxford. CEA is part of Effective Ventures, a federation of projects working to have a large positive impact in the world.
Open Philanthropy is a research and grantmaking foundation that makes grants based on the principles of effective altruism. It was founded as a partnership between GiveWell and Good Ventures. Its current chief executive officer is Alexander Berger, and its main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz says that their wealth, worth $16 billion, "belongs to the world. We intend not to have much when we die."
Effective Altruism Global, abbreviated EA Global or EAG, is a series of annual philanthropy events that focus on the effective altruism movement. They are organised by the Centre for Effective Altruism. Huffington Post editor Nico Pitney described one event as a gathering of "nerd altruists", which was "heavy on people from technology, science, and analytical disciplines".
Cari Tuna is an American nonprofit businessperson. Formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she co-founded and works for the organizations Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures.
Charity assessment is the process of analysis of the goodness of a non-profit organization in financial terms. Historically, charity evaluators have focused on the question of how much of contributed funds are used for the purpose(s) claimed by the charity, while more recently some evaluators have placed an emphasis on the cost effectiveness of charities.
An exit grant is a grant made with the clear expectation that the donor will not make any further similar grants to the donee.
Helen Toner is an Australian researcher, and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. She was a board member of OpenAI when CEO Sam Altman was fired.
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