High frontier returns likely imply short timelines

Tl;dr: We believe shareholders in frontier labs who plan to donate some portion of their equity to reduce AI risk should consider liquidating and donating a majority of that equity now.

Epistemic status: We’re somewhat confident in the main conclusions of this piece. We’re more confident in many of the supporting claims, and we’re likewise confident that these claims push in the direction of our conclusions. This piece is admittedly pretty one-sided; we expect most relevant members of our audience are already aware of the main arguments pointing in the other direction, and we expect there's less awareness of the sorts of arguments we lay out here.

This piece is for educational purposes only and not financial advice. Talk to your financial advisor before acting on any information in this piece.



For AI safety-related donations, money donated later is likely to be a lot less valuable than [...]

---

Outline:

(03:54) 1. There's likely to be lots of AI safety money becoming available in 1-2 years

(04:01) 1a. The AI safety community is likely to spend far more in the future than it's spending now

(05:24) 1b. As AI becomes more powerful and AI safety concerns go more mainstream, other wealthy donors may become activated

(06:07) 2. Several high-impact donation opportunities are available now, while future high-value donation opportunities are likely to be saturated

(06:17) 2a. Anecdotally, the bar for funding at this point is pretty high

(07:29) 2b. Theoretically, we should expect diminishing returns within each time period for donors collectively to mean donations will be more valuable when donated amounts are lower

(08:34) 2c. Efforts to influence AI policy are particularly underfunded

(10:21) 2d. As AI company valuations increase and AI becomes more politically salient, efforts to change the direction of AI policy will become more expensive

(13:01) 3. Donations now allow for unlocking the ability to better use the huge amount of money that will likely become available later

(13:10) 3a. Earlier donations can act as a lever on later donations, because they can lay the groundwork for high value work in the future at scale

(15:35) 4. Reasons to diversify away from frontier labs, specifically

(15:42) 4a. The AI safety community as a whole is highly concentrated in AI companies

(16:49) 4b. Liquidity and option value advantages of public markets over private stock

(18:22) 4c. Large frontier AI returns correlate with short timelines

(18:48) 4d. A lack of asset diversification is personally risky

(19:39) Conclusion

(20:22) Some specific donation opportunities

---

First published:
September 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yjiaNbjDWrPAFaNZs/reasons-to-sell-frontier-lab-equity-to-donate-now-rather

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.