We started cleaning our water and waterborne disease (e.g. cholera, typhoid) basically disappeared from the West. We can do the same thing for air.

I wrote an essay about why the next frontier for AI is the world outside the data center Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it How? naturalgeneralintelligence.a…

Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them. There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… We’re providing funding at three levels: 1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team 2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale 3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true! Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.

Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them. There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… We’re providing funding at three levels: 1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team 2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale 3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi… There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true! Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.

News! @coeff_giving is significantly accelerating our global health and wellbeing giving in 2026-27! Increasing our @GiveWell support to $1B was the first step. Today we're taking another: Launchpad Funds, an RFP to seed new funds to take on big, underfunded problems in GHW. 🧵

The OpenAI Foundation is hiring people to help turn AI’s capabilities into benefits people can feel. Doing that takes more than advances in AI itself. It takes new scientific infrastructure, stronger institutions, and organizations that can turn new capabilities into real-world impact. We’re hiring talented and passionate people to help us advance our mission: openaifoundation.org/news/co…

Dialectic 51: Nan Ransohoff! @nanransohoff thinks more of the world's most impressive people should work in philanthropy. And that they needn't sacrifice ambition or upside to do so. Nan leads public goods at @stripe. That includes Frontier (carbon removal) and Intercept (respiratory illness). She's also written about how we need more "general managers" (read: more 'Nan's) and how philanthropy is about to undergo explosive growth thanks to AI money. I talked to Nan about: - GMs and identifying orphaned problems to own end-to-end - coordinating the market to spend billions to suck carbon from the sky and end the common cold - how vision is in short supply - what philanthropy can learn from startups and VCs - the third wave of American philanthropy (driven by billions in OAI/Anthropic philanthropic dollars that will need to be spent) - how many things we may want (good, beauty, meaning) may be harder to quantify and thus require a different philanthropic approach - getting off the "gold star" established path and choosing a life and ambition of her own making Timestamps: 0:00 - Opening Highlights 1:15 - Intro to Nan 4:53 - Start: What is a Nan? Nerd-Sniped by Orphaned Problems 12:39 - GMs, Seeing the Chessboard, and Working Backwards from Outcomes 18:55 - Good Taste in Problems, Vision, and Good Finish Lines 35:43 - Advance Market Commitments Tactically Solving Carbon Removal 41:35 - Focus and Sketching Out or Slicing Up Messy Problems 49:39 - Legibility, Public Rallying, and Ambition in Philanthropy 54:38 - Third Wave Philanthropy and Hard to Quantify Problems 1:06:50 - Risk Tolerance in Philanthropy and Scarcity of Funders and Allocators 1:15:22 - The $40B Tidal Wave of New AI-Money and Why Start Now 1:19:53 - Amount of Capital, Government Philanthropy, and Making Philanthropic Founders Rich 1:31:44 - Nan's Mid-Career Inflection Point and Getting Off the Obvious Path 1:39:47 - Grab-bag: Why Stripe Funds Public Goods, Making Things with Friends, Creative Partnership, Iceland Drone, and Scone Heads 1:49:39 - Syllabi for the Squishy Topics & Study vs. Experience 1:57:01 - Inputs & Outputs and GLPs for Attention 2:04:38 - Closing: Interviewing Parents and Imagining an Obituary @DialecticPod 51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy - is out now below and on all platforms.

The OpenAI Foundation is joining Intercept as a founding partner through our AI resilience program. As AI accelerates advances in biology and medicine, we also need to prepare for the risks of misuse, including the potential for engineered outbreaks. Intercept Health Fund is working to end respiratory pandemics through a pathogen-agnostic approach, investing in broad-spectrum preventatives and non-pharmaceutical interventions that can protect against a wide range of threats and strengthen a new layer of resilience for humanity. blog.interceptfund.com/p/end…

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past. We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that. We heard two main reasons: (1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible. (2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained). We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot. We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street. And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.