OpenPhil is slow. Grants can take 3-6months to be reviewed; in that time, entire projects could have launched or died.
OpenPhil is not open. As of this writing, their latest grant is a $25m grant to Bluedot Impact. This is their entire justification:
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $25,649,888 over three years to BlueDot Impact for general support. BlueDot’s mission is to build the workforce needed to safely navigate transformative AI.
This follows our August 2024 support and falls within our focus area of Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building.
My model is that the OpenPhil grantmakers are doing tons of research and thinking for each grant they review — and then publishing none of it, or only making it available to Good Ventures and their other funders
OpenPhil as monopoly funder warps the field around its interests.
OpenPhil as monopoly funder creates orgs which are dependent on its funding. Grantees don’t build up the muscle of raising funds and support from a wide base; instead, they learn to cater to OP’s grantmaker’s interests.
I think OP has tried to be better about this, eg recommending grants that are conditional on grantees raising funding from other sources.
OpenPhil mostly funds academia: professors and think tanks
OpenPhil grantmakers mostly come out of academia and finance; I can’t name one who has a background in entrepreneurship or startups
OpenPhil is huge! They have ~140 people on hand
People generally don’t say bad stuff about OpenPhil because of funder power dynamics :P
Caveats
OpenPhil employs some of the best (smart, thoughtful, caring) people I know; almost every single OpenPhil employee I meet is a great person.
Frankly, this makes this whole thing worse — it feels like the org is somehow less than the sum of its parts?
OpenPhil is the worst foundation, except for all other foundations out there.