Alexander Berger

An NIH stop-work order threatened the lives of monkeys involved in a Harvard-led study. Then came a $500,000 donation. - The Boston Globe The rhesus macaques were at risk of being prematurely euthanized after the $60 million research project, led in part by a Harvard scientist, was cut off from its NIH funding this week.

New paper: www.thelancet.com/journals/la...
Background on the rescue funding: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/18/...

Last year, our science team stepped in with emergency funding to save TB vaccine research that was about to be shut down due to NIH cuts. Cool to see this new paper from some of those researchers randomly cross my desk (and cite my colleague Abie Rohrig)!

In this talk, Alexander Berger, CEO of Open Philanthropy, discusses a number of examples of how philanthropic funding can help accelerate progress, especiall... The role of philanthropy in promoting progress (and safety)

My talk at the 2025 Progress Conference is out!

I talk about CG's support of science & tech progress, YIMBYism & SB 79 as case studies, why you should care about worst-case AI risks if you're pro-progress, and the relationship between progress and safety.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaO...

Scaling long-running autonomous coding Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …

"When I made my 2029 prediction this is more-or-less the quality of result I had in mind."
simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19...

Interesting paper from a grantee on productivity gains from LLM usage arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21316

Cool annual impact report from our grantee @epochai.bsky.social, including many great testimonials.

High-quality unbiased data on compute & model trends is really important!
epoch.ai/blog/epoch-...

The Post-AGI Workshop: Economics, Culture and Governance | San Diego 2025 Join us in San Diego on December 3rd, 2025 to explore post-AGI economics, culture, and governance. Co-located with NeurIPS.

And here's a talk from Beren on related topics: post-agi.org/talks/milli...

Really enjoyed this post from Beren Millidge thinking through what alignment looks like in singleton vs. multipolar AGI scenarios www.beren.io/2026-01-07-...

Blocking new housing doesn't stop rich people from moving in. Instead, it means unleashing them on the existing housing stock.

In SF, increased demand from the tech boom was not met with new supply, so landlords withdrew their rentals to sell to tech workers.

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Really cool article about @sholtodavid.bsky.social's successful work finding fraudulent data in cancer research
www.thetimes.com/uk/science/...

A reminder that we're hiring for several really important roles at Coefficient Giving! Learn more here: coefficientgiving.org/about-us/ca...

"Models keep getting more impressive at the rate the short timelines people predict, but more useful at the rate the long timelines people predict."

This is a great essay:
www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-...

In a year of steep challenges, there were still shining moments in global health The Trump administration's deep cuts in U.S. foreign health aid had a devastating impact. Yet there were achievements of note in spite of it all.

Despite unprecedented cuts to global aid, there were still bright spots for global health in 2025, including progress on reducing lead exposure.

@rachelbonnifield.bsky.social discusses the decline in Bangladeshi children's blood lead levels in @npr.org:
https://go.cgdev.org/3N2J6Cb

From Deviations to Shortfalls: The Effects of the FOMC's New Employment Objective (January 2026) - We analyze the effects of a monetary policy that stabilizes "shortfalls" rather than "deviations" of employment from its maximum level. A shortfalls-stabilization rule leads to expect...

AEJ-Macro: Fed move to stabilize "shortfalls" rather than "deviations" of employment from max raises average inflation and nominal policy rates by 90 basis points, reduces the likelihood of a binding zero lower bound, implies a steeper & nonlinear Phillips curve. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Don't think I did FWIW!

Thanks also to @michaelnielsen.bsky.social who has correctly raved about OWID's work for a long time and whose praise pushed me to look closer at this when it came up.

Anti-Portfolio Honoring the companies we missed.

I think we likely should have funded OWID earlier, but b/c they focus on many different areas, they didn't easily slot into one of our funds. (I ended up funding them through a discretionary grant.)

I’m excited to bring them from our “anti-portfolio” to our portfolio.
www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio

Data Insights Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days

Their blogging and other written output has also been fantastic IMO
ourworldindata.org/data-insights

In doing so, they've made massive contributions to improving the epistemic environment around these areas for journalists, policymakers and philanthropists (our team has benefited a bunch from their work).

Artificial Intelligence AI already has a large impact on our world. Explore research and data to understand the trajectory of this important technology.

OWID work provides incredibly useful data across many areas where Coefficient works, including:

- Global health: ourworldindata.org/health-meta
- Innovation and progress: ourworldindata.org/technologic...
- Animal welfare: ourworldindata.org/animal-welfare
- AI: ourworldindata.org/artificial-...

I wanted to give an end-of-year shout out to @ourworldindata.org, who we recently gave a three-year, $3m general support grant (short 🧵)

Suggestions for Individual Donors from Coefficient Giving Staff – 2025 | Coefficient Giving The 2025 edition of our annual tradition: a list of giving opportunities suggested by Coefficient Giving program staff.

Our staff's 2025 recommendations for individual donors, fresh off the press: coefficientgiving.org/research/su...

Ezra Klein (@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social) Today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show. Elie Hassenfeld, the chief executive of the nonprofit GiveWell, makes the case for a more rigorous, transparent and accountable approach to charitable giving. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Ff6NfCU3zyVOeoMVdoQth?si=kW0wPVG-Q-2FCPJlM87A1A https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-elie-hassenfeld.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9E8.EhVO.bO5y0UWPqLjl&smid=url-share

I'm excited that Coefficient Giving will continue to be major GiveWell supporters. GiveWell is still where a lot of my personal giving goes and I think they're an outstanding resource for donors.

This interview was great if you want to learn more: bsky.app/profile/ezr...

... and lastly, we've updated how we compare their cost-effectiveness measures to ours; we now think this additional funding roughly equalizes GiveWell’s funding bar with ours.

The main reasons for increasing our support:
-We expect our overall spending (from both Good Ventures and other partners) to grow significantly in 2026 and this is a strong/robust place to do so.
-GW raised less in 2024 from others than we had anticipated they would...

Some examples of where recent GiveWell funding has gone:
-$22m to the Against Malaria Foundation for bednets in the DRC
-$3m to Concern Worldwide for malnutrition treatment and healthcare in Somalia
-$7.8m to Evidence Action to expand technical assistance for iron and folic acid supplementation

Our Planned Allocation to GiveWell’s Recommendations for the Next Few Years | Coefficient Giving This post outlines our plans for funding GiveWell's recommended charities from 2023-25, how we decided on those plans, and why we still view GiveWell as the gold standard for donors seeking evidence-backed giving opportunities.

In 2023, we committed $300m over three years to GiveWell’s evidence-backed, cost-effective global health recommendations.

We’ve now decided to renew that support early and increase it.
coefficientgiving.org/research/ou...

Allocating $175M to GiveWell’s Recommendations for 2026 | Coefficient Giving This post lays out why we've chosen to renew our support for GiveWell’s recommendations; we think it's an outstanding resource and we’re proud to support the organizations it has identified.

Some news: we're committing $175m to @GiveWell in 2026, growing our >$1B committed to date.

Based on GiveWell’s estimates, we think this funding has saved >100,000 lives so far. 🧵

coefficientgiving.org/research/al...

Opinion | The Simplest Way to Save Lives With Your Money Elie Hassenfeld, the chief executive of the nonprofit GiveWell, makes the case for a more rigorous, transparent and accountable approach to charitable giving.

This @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social episode is great! www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/...

Opinion | What Does It Mean to Give Well?

Today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show.

Elie Hassenfeld, the chief executive of the nonprofit GiveWell, makes the case for a more rigorous, transparent and accountable approach to charitable giving.
open.spotify.com/episode/1Ff6...

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/o...