Matt Brooks
I'm a friendly ambitious nerd who enjoys meeting new people, learning new things, growing as a person, and improving the world. 
I'm a ⅔ utilitarian particularly interested in AI and steering towards beneficial outcomes for humanity & AIs.
Currently building grantmaking.ai to help AI Safety funders find great funding opportunities.
I participated in the FLF fellowship. I wrote some thoughts on the topic of "AI for human reasoning" & the fellowship, you can also see everything I worked on during the fellowship.
Want to learn more or get in touch? Read below, check out my resume, or my GitHub.
Especially reach out if you're in the Asheville, NC area.
Feel free to drop me some anonymous feedback.
Site updated July 25, 2026
Thoughts
Projects
About me
I wrote this summary of me with inspiration from this AI analysis.
I consider myself a rationalist, post-rationalist, EA-adjacent builder trying to make AI go well.
I like finding high-leverage bottlenecks that can help make the future radically better. I especially enjoy coordination, truth-seeking, aggregation, and epistemics, but also kindness, beauty, weirdness, and inner aliveness.
What I care about
Transformative AI is the most important and highest-leverage idea right now. Specifically capabilities, alignment, control, timelines, and governance as they relate to X-risk and S-risk. I think we may be in the most important century and at the start of a civilizational phase change that can go incredibly poorly or incredibly well. Cooperation, coordination, incentives, and love can hopefully steer humans and AI down the right path.
What I'm currently working on
grantmaking.ai - it's a coordination platform for AI safety projects and organizations to announce their funding asks, and it helps reviewers, regranters, and AI safety funders to find, evaluate, and fund these projects. I think there are two large bottlenecks around AI safety. The first is that we don't have enough human grantmakers to distribute money as fast and as effectively as we could. The second is we don't have enough founders, projects, and ideas that can absorb additional billions of dollars of funding a year.
Other things I care about
- Introspection and self-optimization: Attempting to make myself happier, healthier, and more alive.
- Agency: Finding the side doors and making things happen.
- Compassion: Caring about beings that need our help, like factory-farmed animals and potentially sentient machines.
- Contemplative practices: Buddhism-lite, jhanas, metta, valence, untangling my mind and how it interacts with the world.
- Long-term flourishing: Taking longtermism seriously but not at the expense of everything else.
What I value
Embodied truth-seeking using the best of the brain, heart, and body together. Counterfactual impact over naive good feelings. Open-mindedness and open-heartedness. Knowing my mental and emotional limitations. Agency, stewardship, beauty, and aliveness. Coordination and win-wins.
Things I'm working on
Over-indexing on the meta-level. Seeing outside of the bubbles I live in and grew up in. Navigating the legible and the illegible. Exploring my curiosity to an appropriate degree.