Hide table of contents

Arkose is an AI safety field building organization. We've been offering one-on-one calls and maintaining a list of public resources for mid-career ML professionals for over six months now, so it seemed like a good time to share some updates with the EA community.

If you want to collaborate with us, you can reach out via team@arkose.org. If you’re a mid-career ML professional and want to request a call, you can do so via our public application form.

Introducing Arkose’s Incoming Executive Director, Victoria Brook

We are pleased to announce that Victoria Brook is joining the Arkose team as our next Executive Director. Victoria will be taking over from Vael Gates, who will remain in an advisory capacity as the organization’s President while transitioning to a new role as Head of Community at FAR AI.

We are very grateful to Vael for founding Arkose and spearheading the initial launch of our programs. Their dedication has been instrumental to our success to date, and we are excited about their continued efforts to grow the AI safety community at FAR AI. At the same time, we are excited to welcome Victoria to our team and we look forward to her leadership in continuing to grow the organization and scale our impact!

Impact Evaluation

Theory of Change & Empirical Target Outcomes

By reaching out to skilled mid-career ML professionals, we hope to expedite their engagement with research focused on large scale risks from advanced AI.

The chart below outlines the main subpopulations of ML professionals that Arkose supports, and the outcomes we aim to achieve with each subpopulation.

Call Data

To date, we’ve had 161 calls.

When asked how much they think engaging in the call will change their involvement in AI safety work (n=86), 79% of participants reported feeling that the call accelerated their AI safety efforts. Specifically:

  • 61.6% reported feeling an acceleration of up to 3 months.
  • 13.9% reported feeling an acceleration of 3 to 12 months.
  • 3.5% reported a significant trajectory change.

Get Involved

If you're a mid-career ML or AI professional who's interested in starting research in AI safety, you can request a call through our public application form and/or sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with the best ways to get involved.

If you want to refer people in your network to have a call with Arkose, you can do so through our referral form or direct them to our public application form.

If you’re a field builder, involved in the AI safety community, or would like to further discuss our work and explore potential collaborations, you can reach out to us at team@arkose.org.

28

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments1


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Victoria has been doing a great job taking over Arkose so far, and I'm excited to see where she brings the organization! It's been hard to find someone as skilled as Victoria to lead ML researcher outreach efforts at Arkose, and I feel grateful and happy to have her at the helm.

Curated and popular this week
trammell
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Introduction When a system is made safer, its users may be willing to offset at least some of the safety improvement by using it more dangerously. A seminal example is that, according to Peltzman (1975), drivers largely compensated for improvements in car safety at the time by driving more dangerously. The phenomenon in general is therefore sometimes known as the “Peltzman Effect”, though it is more often known as “risk compensation”.[1] One domain in which risk compensation has been studied relatively carefully is NASCAR (Sobel and Nesbit, 2007; Pope and Tollison, 2010), where, apparently, the evidence for a large compensation effect is especially strong.[2] In principle, more dangerous usage can partially, fully, or more than fully offset the extent to which the system has been made safer holding usage fixed. Making a system safer thus has an ambiguous effect on the probability of an accident, after its users change their behavior. There’s no reason why risk compensation shouldn’t apply in the existential risk domain, and we arguably have examples in which it has. For example, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) makes AI more reliable, all else equal; so it may be making some AI labs comfortable releasing more capable, and so maybe more dangerous, models than they would release otherwise.[3] Yet risk compensation per se appears to have gotten relatively little formal, public attention in the existential risk community so far. There has been informal discussion of the issue: e.g. risk compensation in the AI risk domain is discussed by Guest et al. (2023), who call it “the dangerous valley problem”. There is also a cluster of papers and works in progress by Robert Trager, Allan Dafoe, Nick Emery-Xu, Mckay Jensen, and others, including these two and some not yet public but largely summarized here, exploring the issue formally in models with multiple competing firms. In a sense what they do goes well beyond this post, but as far as I’m aware none of t
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
 ·  · 19m read
 · 
I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter. — T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”   This post is a personal account of a California legislative campaign I worked on March-June 2024, in my capacity as the indoor air quality program lead at 1Day Sooner. It’s very long—I included as many details as possible to illustrate a playbook of everything we tried, what the surprises and challenges were, and how someone might spend their time during a policy advocacy project.   History of SB 1308 Advocacy Effort SB 1308 was introduced in the California Senate by Senator Lena Gonzalez, the Senate (Floor) Majority Leader, and was sponsored by Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP). The bill was based on a report written by researchers at UC Davis and commissioned by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The bill sought to ban the sale of ozone-emitting air cleaners in California, which would have included far-UV, an extremely promising tool for fighting pathogen transmission and reducing pandemic risk. Because California is such a large market and so influential for policy, and the far-UV industry is struggling, we were seriously concerned that the bill would crush the industry. A partner organization first notified us on March 21 about SB 1308 entering its comment period before it would be heard in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, but said that their organization would not be able to be publicly involved. Very shortly after that, a researcher from Ushio America, a leading far-UV manufacturer, sent out a mass email to professors whose support he anticipated, requesting comments from them. I checked with my boss, Josh Morrison,[1] as to whether it was acceptable for 1Day Sooner to get involved if the partner organization was reluctant, and Josh gave me the go-ahead to submit a public comment to the committee. Aware that the letters alone might not do much, Josh reached out to a friend of his to ask about lobbyists with expertise in Cal