Donate to 80,000 Hours

This page has information about us and our track record. If you’re enthusiastic about what we do and are in a position to give, please consider making a donation:

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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, and right now we’re putting our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with powerful AGI.

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.

We provide four main services:

80,000 Hours was formerly a project of the Effective Ventures group. We spun out into our own entity on April 1, 2025.

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 following chart shows job board placements by year from 2018 to 2024 — though we expect this to underestimate the true number of placements attributable to us due to lag and reporting limitations.

* Other placements includes contractor roles, volunteer positions, fellowships, and scholarships — including opportunities we are particularly excited about like Horizon fellows and ML Alignment and Theory Scholars (MATS).

The table below breaks down the organisations that people have found jobs and other placements at via our job board, from 2018 to 2024.

placements
*Only includes placements we’ve heard about before February 2025.

† Includes positions now at Effective Ventures Operations.

Our headhunting service also contributes to making placements. In 2024, we recommended candidates for 165 impactful roles, mostly to AI safety-focused organisations. So far we’ve identified 14 cases where these searches resulted in someone taking a role they likely otherwise wouldn’t have filled. Though it’s difficult to establish firm counterfactuals in headhunting, these 14 cases involved an organisation hiring a candidate who they weren’t otherwise exploring and where that candidate hadn’t applied by other routes.

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 measure1 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 2024 EA survey, when survey respondents were asked which factors were “important for getting involved in EA,” 59% mentioned 80,000 Hours, making it the most commonly mentioned factor.

When respondents were asked which factors had the largest influence on their personal ability to have a positive impact, 34% 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 2024.

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 2021-2024:

growth
* Includes long term contractors and 80,000 Hours’ share of Effective Ventures’ operations staff.

How to donate

We are able to provide our services free of charge thanks to the generous support of our donors, and — if you’re excited about 80,000 Hours’ impact and you’re in a position to do so — we invite you to join them.

If you’d like to donate, you can:

donate now get in touch

Notes and references

  1. Open Philanthropy reported both weighted and unweighted rankings for each of the different influence factors. The rankings reported above are based on the weighted rankings, which include Open Philanthropy’s quantitative assessment of the value of the respondents career.

    Here’s a breakdown of how 80,000 Hours’ ranking differ when using the unweighted rankings:
    Weighted vs unweighted

  2. For example, people have found roles at DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We write about the potential benefits and risks of different roles at frontier AI companies in our article ‘Should you work at a frontier AI company?‘, and say more about which OpenAI roles we list on the job board and why we list them here. Our views on this topic are informed by a survey of AI safety experts and employees at frontier labs, as well as former employees at OpenAI.