REGISTERED NUMBER: |
UNAUDITED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
FOR |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD |
REGISTERED NUMBER: |
UNAUDITED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
FOR |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
CONTENTS OF THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
Page |
Company Information | 1 |
Review of Business | 2 |
Balance Sheet | 5 |
Notes to the Financial Statements | 6 |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD |
COMPANY INFORMATION |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
DIRECTORS: |
REGISTERED OFFICE: |
REGISTERED NUMBER: |
ACCOUNTANTS: |
Archer House |
Britland Estate |
Northbourne Road |
Eastbourne |
BN22 8PW |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
REVIEW OF BUSINESS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
'Rethink Priorities' mission is to support organizations, researchers, and changemakers in efforts to generate the most significant possible charitable impact for others in the present and the long-term future. |
Program Service Accomplishments: |
Special Projects: RP's Special Projects (SP) team supports priority projects that RP fiscally sponsors, incubates, or directly launches. Since the SP program launched in July 2022, some notable achievements include: 71 fiscal sponsorship expressions of interest received; 12 projects supported; $5.1m total direct costs of supported projects in 2023 alone; 7 sponsee hiring rounds completed; 71 sponsee staff onboarded (total) of which 42 sponsee staff recruited directly by SP; 20 visa sponsorship applications (UK & US); 8 in-person events; 23 days of on-site event support; and 219 total event attendees. In 2023, the following projects were fiscally sponsored or incubated at RP: Epoch, Existential Risk Alliance (ERA), Apollo Research, Effective Altruism Consulting Network (EACN), Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI), Condor Camp, The Insect Institute, and Insect Welfare Research Society. The SP team also supported a founder search for field building for AI Policy and provided event planning services to the Cooperative AI Foundation. |
Animal Welfare: Rethink Priorities' (RP's) Animal Welfare (AW) Department aims to be a leading hub of research and innovation to accelerate the end of factory farming and reduce the suffering of other animals. Through work spanning independent research, consulting services, and applied projects, the team supports advocacy organizations, philanthropic foundations, and other actors to drive evidence-based and reason-driven change for animals. Some notable accomplishments from the Animal Welfare department over the course of the year include: publication of our research about the potential effects of plant-based alternatives in replacing animal-based products and our findings on the role of price, taste, and convenience in driving food choice; continued efforts to lead EU policy reform with an EU farmed fish policy reform roadmap brief; success in launching The Insect Institute by building an academic community around insect welfare through research and dissemination activities, with fifteen academics and six students collaborating with us and another seventeen academics expressing interest for future work; convening the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum to provide an annual space for leaders of animal advocacy organizations to strategize together and strengthen the movement; and estimating that shrimp production for human food is more important in scale-i.e., in the number of individuals affected than the problem of insect farming, wild fish captures, or the farming of any other vertebrates used for human consumption. |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
REVIEW OF BUSINESS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
AI Policy and Strategy: In 2023, Rethink Priorities' (RP's) AI Governance and Strategy Department launched into a new think tank called Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS). A brief overview of IAPS' four main workstreams and 2023 accomplishments follows: (1) Compute governance work aims to establish a firmer empirical and theoretical grounding for the fledgling field of compute governance, to inform ongoing policy processes and debates, and to develop more concrete technical and policy proposals. In 2023, RP published a report on AI chip smuggling into China, prominently mentioned in The Times online newspaper. RP also co-authored a forthcoming paper with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) focused on using on-chip governance mechanisms to manage national security risks from AI and advanced computing. Both of these above-mentioned reports have received positive feedback and interest from researchers and senior US policymakers. The authors have been asked to deliver briefings on their findings to audiences, including through roundtable discussions co-hosted by CNAS and in the Foundation for American Innovation's podcast. (2) Lab governance work aims to identify concrete interventions that could improve the safety, security, and governance of frontier AI labs' systems via voluntary lab commitments, standards, or regulations. Program accomplishments from 2023 include publications which describe how frontier AI developers can respond to risks discovered after deployment of a model through a toolkit of "deployment corrections"; expansion on previous cybersecurity work to provide a wide-ranging yet actionable framework for risk management of emerging threats from AI; and, working with the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) to examine the risks and benefits of open-sourcing in highly capable foundation models.(3) AI regulations work aims to focus on US AI standards, regulations, and legislation, using methods including case studies from other sectors. Some highlights from 2023 include the production of a series of outputs drawing lessons from risk management and regulation in other sectors and co-authoring on a forthcoming paper about Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress. (4) China & international governance work aims to improve decisions at the intersection of AI governance and international governance or China. Work was conducted on questions related to international governance regimes for frontier AI, China-West relations concerning AI, and relevant technical and policy developments within China. Some highlights from 2023 include working with GovAI on a report on international AI safety dialogues and working with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) on a forthcoming report on possible risks from AI alignment efforts and how to avoid them. |
Global Health and Development: Rethink Priorities' (RP's) Global Health and Development (GHD) Department conducts high quality research on important global health, international development, and climate issues and uses its research to influence relevant stakeholders, such that they move resources towards more cost-effective interventions to ultimately increase wellbeing in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs). GHD completed ~30 reports in 2023 on topics such as mental health, climate change, and medicine in the developing world. GHD also significantly expanded its work with GiveWell in 2023 as well as formally launched its consulting services work. The GHD team also hosted a global health and development strategy forum, an event which brought together ~20 different stakeholders from the EA GHD community, and they hosted a series of roundtable discussions with other EA organizations doing work in the climate space. |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
REVIEW OF BUSINESS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
Worldview Investigations: Rethink Priorities' (RP's) Worldview Investigations Team (WIT) exists to improve resource allocation by focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on philanthropic priorities. WIT builds on RP's work as a multi-cause, stakeholder-driven research organization and aims to take action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turn them into manageable, modelable problems. RP formally launched WIT in January 2023. Some of the research reports produced in 2023 by WIT include: Why Neuron Counts Shouldn't Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight; Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently?; Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range Estimates; The Risks and Rewards of Prioritizing Animals of Uncertain Sentience; How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization?; Charting the precipice: The time of perils and prioritising x-risk; Uncertainty over time and Bayesian updating; Is x-risk the most cost-effective if we count only the next few generations?; Rethink Priorities' Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM): Introduction and Overview; How Rethink Priorities is Addressing Risk and Uncertainty. RP's work was referenced by external partners, presented at 15 different academic institutions, including New York University and Princeton, and also picked up by 11 news outlets. A book reporting the results of the project is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Surveys and Data Analysis: Rethink Priorities' (RP's) Surveys and Data Analysis Department supported work in a variety of high priority causes in 2023 through conducting surveys, polling, other forms of psychological and behavioral experiments and focus groups, and data analysis. In the last two years, the team has completed over 100 projects in total, including small-scale consultations and analyses (more than 60 in 2023 alone). Of these, 42 were survey projects (some involving multiple surveys), 47 were data analysis projects, and 17 were private consultations on statistics or methodology. Some highlights include: Polling public attitudes towards important contemporary issues, such as risks associated with Frontier AI systems; Message testing to examine which messages, frames, and brandings lead to the highest levels of support for different causes among different groups; Running experiments for a number of different orgs to assess the effectiveness of different advertisements; Analyzing data for various organizations to help them have a higher impact; Conducting and consulting on academic research projects on topics such as wild animal welfare and human challenge trials. In 2023, RP published 15 reports online, sharing the results of several survey and data analysis projects. The team also supported some of RP's internal work in global health and development and animal welfare. |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
BALANCE SHEET |
30 APRIL 2024 |
Notes | £ |
CURRENT ASSETS |
Debtors | 4 |
Cash at bank |
CREDITORS |
Amounts falling due within one year | 5 |
TOTAL ASSETS LESS CURRENT LIABILITIES |
RESERVES | - |
The directors acknowledge their responsibilities for: |
(a) | ensuring that the company keeps accounting records which comply with Sections 386 and 387 of the Companies Act 2006 and |
(b) | preparing financial statements which give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the company as at the end of each financial year and of its surplus or deficit for each financial year in accordance with the requirements of Sections 394 and 395 and which otherwise comply with the requirements of the Companies Act 2006 relating to financial statements, so far as applicable to the company. |
The financial statements were approved by the Board of Directors and authorised for issue on |
RETHINK PRIORITIES UK LTD (REGISTERED NUMBER: 14807023) |
NOTES TO THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS |
FOR THE PERIOD 17 APRIL 2023 TO 30 APRIL 2024 |
1. | STATUTORY INFORMATION |
Rethink Priorities UK Ltd is a |
2. | ACCOUNTING POLICIES |
Basis of preparing the financial statements |
Turnover |
Turnover is measured at the fair value of the consideration received or receivable, excluding discounts, rebates, value added tax and other sales taxes. |
Pension costs and other post-retirement benefits |
The company operates a defined contribution pension scheme. Contributions payable to the company's pension scheme are charged to profit or loss in the period to which they relate. |
3. | EMPLOYEES AND DIRECTORS |
The average number of employees during the period was |
4. | DEBTORS: AMOUNTS FALLING DUE WITHIN ONE YEAR |
£ |
Amounts owed by group undertakings |
Other debtors |
5. | CREDITORS: AMOUNTS FALLING DUE WITHIN ONE YEAR |
£ |
Trade creditors |
Taxation and social security |
Other creditors |
6. | RELATED PARTY DISCLOSURES |
Rethink Priorities UK Ltd is a related entity to the US charity Rethink Priorities USA. It provides resources to the US entity and charges a management fee for the services provided. During the year Rethink Priorities UK Ltd charged the US entity £2,632,698. |