How The Centre for Enabling EA Learning and Research would use additional funding

The Centre for Enabling EA Learning and Research (CEEALAR) is a space for promising EAs to rapidly upskill, perform research, and work on charitable and entrepreneurial projects. We provide assistance at low cost to those seeking to do the most good through subsidising accommodation, organising a productive atmosphere, and fostering a strong EA community. We recently published a post announcing that we are funding constrained and looking to attract new donors over this giving season.

How we would use extra funding

It costs us £12,500 ($15,500) to run CEEALAR for 1 month. We host an average of 20 grantees at a time – making the cost of supporting 1 grantee for 1 month £625 ($750). Unfortunately, we only have ~3 months runway remaining: a donation from you would extend our runway and enable us to support more promising EAs.

We do not know all of the applicants we will be supporting 3 months from now; however, we recently updated our application criteria to be increasingly selective, and are seeing the results of assisting such high-quality applicants. To give a sense of how much can happen in 1 month alone, we have included examples of outputs solely from October. We are confident that we would accept applicants of similar quality and see similar outputs in the spring months if we are able to extend our runway.

Donations extending our runway will:

• Enable more talented individuals to upskill into impactful work
  • This October, a recent alumnus now working as a researcher in the MIT Fraenkel Lab (where they are building an LLM for metabolomics research using retrieval-augmented generation) was accepted to the AI Futures Fellowship Program. They used their time at CEEALAR to transition from a career in data science to AI safety research.
• Enable more EA organisations to launch
  • This October, two current guests received funding from an EA grantmaking org to launch ML4Good UK. ML4Good is a project that runs intensive AI safety bootcamps in the UK, Germany, France, and Switzerland. Before coming to CEEALAR, they worked in banking and tech respectively and were only involved in EA in a voluntary capacity.
• Enable more EA research to be done
  • This October, a current guest had their research paper accepted to the Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) conference. They are using their time at CEEALAR to transition from an academic career in physics to AI safety research.

How you can donate

You can donate here – all donations are greatly appreciated and will help us stay alive! We support PayPal, Ko-Fi, PPF Fiscal Sponsorship, and bank transfer donations.

You can find out more about CEEALAR here! Please feel free to ask us questions at contact@ceealar.org.