Our Progress in 2024 and Plans for 2025

Our 2024 annual review is now live! It offers brief updates on grantmaking from each of our programs, tracks new goals and initiatives, and looks forward to the rest of 2025.

Here are a few highlights from the year:

• We launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF), a >$100 million collaborative fund to reduce lead exposure globally. LEAF marked our first major foray into partnering with other funders beyond Good Ventures, and we’re planning to do a lot more in this vein going forward.
• Our longtime grantee David Baker won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work using AI for protein design. We’re proud to have supported both the basic methods development and the potentially high-impact humanitarian applications of his work for ailments like syphilis, hepatitis C, snakebite, and malaria.
• Our grantee Open New York played an important role in the recent passage of New York City’s largest zoning overhaul in over 60 years. The city planning department expects the package to create 80,000 new homes over 15 years, making this the first set of major YIMBY reforms to pass in New York City.
• Research mentorship programs that we fund continue to produce some of the top technical talent in AI safety and security. Graduates of programs like MATS, the Astra Fellowship, LASR Labs, and ERA-AI have contributed to key safety areas like interpretability, evaluations, and loss of control. For instance, MATS now trains more than 100 aspiring AI safety researchers annually, some of whom rapidly contribute to the field: a recent graduate received a “Best Paper” award at one of the leading AI conferences.
• Our grantee, the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund, brought attention to the unprecedented risks of creating mirror bacteria, working alongside a group of 30+ esteemed scientists (including two Nobel laureates). Their work was published in Science along with a 300-page technical report detailing the risks. 
• We directed $87 million to GiveWell-recommended charities. We continue to think that these charities are among the highest-value uses of philanthropic money, and we are proud to support their work on malaria, vitamin A deficiency, childhood vaccination, and more.

You can read the rest of this post on our website.