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About Us
Our Mission
Impact Academy is a startup that runs cutting-edge fellowships to enable global talent to use their careers to contribute to the safe and beneficial development of AI.
To fulfil our mission and deliver the best interventions possible, we employ an experimental approach to program implementation, conduct applied research, and share our findings. We may also provide grants to our participants and others who share our aims.
Our History
Impact Academy was founded in February 2023 by Vilhelm Skoglund, Sebastian Schmidt, and Lowe Lundin after having run Future Academy - a six-month ambitious educational program. In 2024, we were joined by Varun Agrawal, who ran India's first AI Safety Careers Fellowship. At present, we're directing the majority of our efforts towards AI safety research field-building, with an emphasis on regions of the global majority.
Support Us
We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without all the great people who help us. We’re truly grateful for all your support and encouragement. Here are a few ways you can help us:
Make a donation
We provide our services free of charge, so we are dependent upon the support of generous donors. To learn more about our funding needs, please reach out to Sebastian.
Recommend someone to work with us
We are keen on finding more staff and advisors who are an excellent fit with our team and mission. Recommendations are highly appreciated, and if someone you recommend ends up getting a job, we are happy to consider giving you a bounty.
Share our content on social media
Invite your friends to follow us on LinkedIn.
Stay updated
Stay updated on our progress as an organization to learn about how else you can help.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ
How is Impact Academy funded?
Impact Academy is funded by various different sources, but most of our funding has come from a family foundation in Sweden - Charlottes och Fredriks Stiftelse. We have also received support from Open Philanthropy. Recently, we have received funding from different private donors and family foundations based in the US.
Why are you doing what you are doing?
AI might be the most transformative technology of all time. To make it go well for humanity, we must seriously consider the types of risks advanced AI systems of the future might pose. Fortunately, there is a growing ecosystem of professionals and institutions dedicated to researching and solving these problems- AI safety.
We believe we can support talent who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to play an important role in AI safety through their careers.
What is effective altruism, and how does it relate to Impact Academy?
Everyone wants to do good, but many ways of doing good are ineffective. This led to many ideas like the following:
- It’s critical to pay attention to how many people are affected by a particular intervention. When we do this, it seems that some ways of doing good are over 100 times more effective than others.
- We should focus on problems that are important, neglected, and tractable.
- We can do a lot of good with our careers.
- New technologies might threaten to wipe out life on earth, and reducing this risk might be a key priority.
- Some sentient beings are ignored because they don't look like us or are far away.
Impact Academy is inspired by the ideas of effective altruism and collaborates with many organizations in the community, but we are totally independent and pursue distinct venues for doing good. E.g. we put a particular focus on doing issues related to the far future and think EA puts too little attention on non-consequentialist notions of doing good.