“Towards The Autograntor” by Scott Alexander

I've done AI safety grantmaking for the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Lightcone Commons. It's hard. There's an endless amount to know, from which hardware verification mechanisms will survive a dedicated adversary, all the way to which founders have skeletons in their closets that will blow up into destructive scandals. And the best grantmakers - not including me - make mathematical models of the outcome distribution, or of where the marginal dollar stops being highly effective. AI has been a godsend for all of this. It can research, model, and - as of this year - superforecast outcomes. It can do what would be hours of work for a human in minutes. I found myself using it more and more. But however much I used it, it always felt like I was the bottleneck. The parts I could outsource to AI were sparkling, perfect, exhaustive - but they were all tacked together with shoddy connective tissue formed by the Mark 1.0 human brain. So I wondered if I could automate grantmaking. I started with the dumbest possible strategy. I assigned the best thing I could think of - a well-crafted US-China pause based on the AI Futures Project's Plan [...] --- Outline: (02:54) The Milestones (06:26) The FutureSearch Connector (08:26) PERCYs (10:28) The Autograntor Common Law (12:59) The Prompt (19:12) Sample Runs (20:00) Apart Research -- $800K grant forecast (2026-10-21) (20:08) Headline (21:29) Expected-value table (judge's ledger; EV after the execution factor 0.75 and branch weights) (22:38) Assumptions and uncertainties (24:50) How the estimates moved (25:47) The three decisions that mattered most (27:42) Rulings and milestones (29:31) Values questions (CL-11), priced both ways (29:56) Open questions for the user or applicant (30:43) FutureSearch (31:13) Cost (31:47) Process problems (36:39) Doom Debates -- $200K grant forecast (independent re-run, 2026-10-22) (37:28) Headline (judge) (38:58) EV table (judge ledger, after branch weights and execution factor mean 0.85, 4% collapse) (39:21) Assumptions and uncertainties (40:39) How the estimates moved (41:13) Comparison with the earlier run (read only after this verdict) (41:57) Rulings and milestones (43:43) FutureSearch (one session, two questions; session 00af7fba-7c44-4736-b2ed-489c7a6b180a) (44:26) Open questions (44:59) Cost (45:16) Process notes (47:04) So . . . what now? (53:11) Instructions for replicating/testing this The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sfkv6JF2ozmAkggKu/towards-the-autograntor --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.