Donate to 80,000 Hours

About us

At 80,000 Hours, we provide research and support to help people have high-impact careers.

Our goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. We focus on problems that threaten the long-term future, including risks from artificial intelligence and catastrophic pandemics.

To achieve our goal, we:

1. Reach people who might be interested through marketing, engaging and user-friendly content, and word-of-mouth.
2. Introduce people to information, frameworks, and ideas which are useful for having a high-impact career and help them get excited about contributing to solving pressing global problems.
3. Support people in transitioning to careers that contribute to solving pressing global problems.
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We provide four main services:

80,000 Hours is currently a project of the Effective Ventures group, though we will spin out into our own entity during 2025. You can read more about Effective Ventures’ plans here and our own plan here.

Our track record

We think that donating to 80,000 Hours is a promising way for people with similar priorities as us to have an impact.

We have a strong track record of encouraging people to change their career plans to focus on pressing problems, helping them find impactful positions, and introducing them to the effective altruism community.

Here, we’ll go through a few recent sources of evidence about our impact. You may also want to explore our repository of organisation evaluations, which cover our historical impact and progress. You can also reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions.

Plan changes

We have tracked hundreds of cases where people have made a major decision to pursue a higher-impact path — such as deciding to go to grad school, switching causes, or taking a particular job — which they say they might not have done without us.

We call these plan changes. Because careers are so long, we think an average plan change influences how someone spends tens of thousands of hours. We estimate that this is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value to the world over the course of each person’s lifetime.

As of the end of 2022, we had tracked 604 plan changes in our history. We estimate that the true number of plan changes for this period was closer to 2,000, because we only expect to find out about a fraction of all plan changes.

Here are four examples of plan changes:

Placements

Top organisations working on global catastrophic risk reduction regularly tell us that we’re their best source of referrals.

The table below shows some of the roles people have found on our job board between 2018 and March 2024 — though we expect this to underestimate the true number of placements attributable to us.

We also know about 29 times when our headhunting service introduced an organisation to a candidate who they hadn’t already been considering and then that person was hired for the role.¹

Open Philanthropy’s survey

Open Philanthropy’s 2020 survey recognised 80,000 Hours as one of seven organisations and individuals that “seemed to have been most impactful on our respondents robustly, across multiple metrics,” highlighting the influence of all of our programmes.

According to Open Philanthropy’s overall impact-weighted measure² of how influential different factors were in the years up to 2020:

• Engagement with 80,000 Hours was tied as the most mentioned factor in the free text questions about what increased respondents’ positive impact on the world. When respondents were asked to name the top four of these factors that influenced them, 80,000 Hours was the 4th most mentioned factor.

• When respondents were prompted to assign influence to a list of factors, 80,000 Hours was the 2nd most influential factor.

Open Philanthropy ran another, larger survey in 2023. Unfortunately, there isn’t a public version of this, but they have shared with us that we positively influenced the careers of a similar proportion of survey respondents from 2020–2022.

EA survey

In the 2022 EA survey, when survey respondents were asked which factors were “important for getting involved in EA,” 58% mentioned 80,000 Hours, making it the most commonly mentioned factor.

When respondents were asked which factors had helped them have an impact and connect with other EAs, 31% mentioned 80,000 Hours, making it the 2nd most commonly mentioned factor.

Our user surveys

We have also conducted our own user surveys, most recently in 2022. You can read the results here.

80,000 Hours’ work on AI safety

Some of our donors have asked whether 80,000 Hours is a strong donation opportunity from the perspective of AI safety. This section outlines some of our work in this area.

Right now, we think that the risk of an AI-related catastrophe is the most pressing problem that many of our users could work on.

We think that we’ve made some valuable contributions here. To give a sense of this, here’s a snapshot of the work we’ve done in the last 12 months (October 2023 to September 2024).

• We had around 226,700 clickthroughs from our job board to AI safety and policy roles.
  • We also think that many of our career development roles will be useful for people planning to work in AI roles in the future.
  • Historically, people have found jobs at, for example, GovAI, Redwood, Constellation, METR, and frontier AI companies with potentially high-impact roles³ through our job board.
• We released 21 podcast episodes on AI. Some of our favourites are:
  • Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI and on government and society after AGI
  • Sella Nevo on who’s trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them
  • Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war
  • Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
• We updated four of our existing articles on AI:
  • Our article on the question, should you work at a frontier AI company?
  • Our problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe
  • Our career review on AI governance and policy
  • Our career review on AI safety technical research
• We also published:
  • A problem profile on understanding the moral status of digital minds
  • An article on stable totalitarianism which focuses on how AI contributes to the risk
  • Our skills series which emphasise skills important for careers in AI safety, including software and tech skills, policy and political skills, and engineering skills.
  • Eight research newsletters on AI-related topics and a blog post from Ben Todd on “AI for epistemics“
• We’ve carried out 128 headhunts for AI-focused roles at 46 different orgs‎.

• We had advising calls with many people excited about working on AI, helping them to think through their uncertainties, test out their fit, and build their network in AI.

This kind of work means that we have a history of helping people on their path to working on AI safety. Neel is one example of this.

If you’d like more information about our work on AI or another particular cause area, please contact [email protected].

Growth over time

While the information in our track record above gives a better picture of our historical impact, the lead metrics here are also useful for understanding our current engagement and output. We estimate there’s a 1–4 year lag between the primary year that people engage with our service and the time of their plan change, so our lead metrics are a proxy for how our impact might grow in the future.

Here are our key lead metrics for each programme and team size for 2021-2023:

You can review a more complete set of our historical metrics going back to 2011 here.

What we’re fundraising for

Briefly: we’re currently fundraising $1,700,000 to support our general activities (excluding marketing and grantmaking) until the middle of 2025.

In more detail, we’re fundraising for:

• Our general budget — we’re seeking to cover the costs of our general budget, which supports our staff and products.
  • It does not include our paid marketing and grantmaking, which we fundraise for separately. If you’d like to know more about those budgets, please contact [email protected].
• Twelve months of our general budget — in this fundraising round, we’re aiming to cover our general budget for the period Q3 2024 to Q2 2025.
  • We currently aim to keep 12 months of “keeping the lights on” runway in reserves, because it’s difficult to change our income and expenses quickly. Through some underspend of our previous budget and our previous planned runway, our existing reserves already cover the runway for the 12 months after Q2 2025, so we’re not fundraising for this now. You can see this in the calculation of our fundraising ask below.
• 20% of our fundraising ask — we’ve already fundraised for 80% of our fundraising ask from Open Philanthropy, so we’re now fundraising for the final 20%. We value having diverse funding sources and are excited to grow our network of donors. In the future, we hope to raise a higher proportion of our ask from donors other than Open Philanthropy.
• Hiring — we will continue to steadily grow our team so that we can overcome capacity bottlenecks in key areas of the organisation. We think this will increase our impact in expectation through increased delivery and quality of the relevant programmes. It will also give us opportunities to expand our reach, for example by adding capacity to produce video content.
• Our new legal entity — by default, donations will be paid into our new entity. We’ll discuss with donors if another option seems more suitable.

This is our general budget for Q3 2024 – Q2 2025, compared to our actuals in the preceding twelve months.

Note that these amounts, and those in the following table, are rounded; line items may not add up exactly to the total shown.

This is how we calculated our fundraising ask:

‎You can see our latest financial accounts here.

How to donate

We provide our services free of charge, so we are dependent upon the support of generous donors. Our largest donor is Open Philanthropy, but we value being able to support ourselves with a range of funding sources and are excited to grow our network of donors so we can fundraise a higher proportion of our fundraising ask from non-Open Philanthropy donors in future.

If you’d like to donate, you can:

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