Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by Tobias Häberli, Tilman
2 min read 5

51

AI safetyBiosecurityCareer choiceExistential riskOpportunities to take actionApplication announcementsFellowships and internshipsAnnouncements and updatesPivotal ResearchResearch training programs
Frontpage

We are happy to announce that the Swiss Existential Risk Initiative (CHERI) is now Pivotal Research and the CHERI research fellowship is called the Pivotal Research Fellowship.

Apply for the Pivotal Research Fellowship this summer in London to research global catastrophic risks (GCR) with experienced mentors on technical AI safety, AI governance, biosecurity & pandemic preparedness.

Research Fellowship

The Pivotal Research Fellowship will take place in London from July 1st to August 30th, 2024. In our fourth research fellowship, we offer a 9-week program providing fellows with experienced mentors and research managers. Accepted applicants will have the opportunity to work full-time on GCR reduction focusing on emerging technologies: we look forward to hosting fellows working on technical AI safety, AI governance, biosecurity & pandemic preparedness. 

Apply now

 

Overview of the fellowship

  • Applicants submit a preliminary research proposal that outlines what they are interested in working on during the fellowship. Once accepted, fellows will collaborate with our research managers to adapt and optimize their proposal, and identify suitable mentors for their project.
  • Fellows are mentored by experienced researchers and policymakers. A selection of our previous mentors can be found here. 
  • The research manager is a key contact throughout the fellowship, assisting with research, enhancing productivity, and providing career support.
  • The fellowship will be located at the LISA offices in London. The offices are a hub for numerous significant initiatives within the GCR domain, including BlueDot Impact, Apollo Research, and the MATS extension program.
  • Fellows receive a stipend of £5000, travel and accommodation expense support, as well as free lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday.
  • Anyone is welcome to apply. We are particularly excited about applicants with little experience but a deep interest in GCR research.  
  • Application Deadline: Sunday, 21st of April, at 23:59 (UTC+1).

Reasons to Apply

  • Gain experience in AI safety and biorisk research through the guidance of your experienced mentor.
  • Set yourself on a path to a meaningful career, focused on impactful work to improve global safety and security.
  • Co-work at a GCR hub surrounded by like-minded researchers.

In our experience, many excellent candidates hesitate to apply. If you're unsure, we encourage you to err on the side of applying. We also encourage you to share this opportunity with others who may be a good fit.

Pivotal 

The fellowship's rebranding decision stems from the organization's operations no longer being confined to projects in Switzerland. 

As Pivotal, we strive to carry out various projects as a principal measure to support the GCR talent pipeline. We believe fellowships are still one of the most promising opportunities for upcoming researchers to get started with GCR research. In the past, fellowships have been a significant stepping stone, enabling participants to start impactful careers within and outside the GCR ecosystem.

With Pivotal’s rebranding, leadership has also been transitioning: Naomi Nederlof, who held the position of Director at CHERI, has transitioned to a role as an advisor at Pivotal. Tobias Häberli, previously the Program Director of CHERI, and Tilman Räuker, formerly a Technical AI Safety Research Manager at ERA, are now serving as co-directors of Pivotal.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Apply now

51

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in

More posts like this

Comments5


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
OscarD🔸6
0
0

Exciting! Why the relocation from Switzerland to the UK? The fact that there are more EA/X-risk projects already in London seems like both a pro (more networking and community opportunities, better access to mentors) and a con (less differentiation with other projects like ERA and MATS, less neglected than mainland Europe fellowships).

Feel free to not reply if you deliberately don't want to make this reasoning public.

Reply
Tobias Häberli6
0
0
1

Hi Oscar, thanks for the question! To clarify, only the fellowship has moved to the UK, not our entire organisation.

We've thought a lot about the pros and cons of moving from Switzerland and largely agree with your points.[1] The main driver for our decision was Switzerland's comparatively small GCR network.

We see the fellowship as an opportunity to immerse fellows in a rich intellectual environment, which London’s – and especially LISA’s – GCR ecosystem offers. Our experience of running fellowships outside of established hubs suggests that fellowships alone are not a great vehicle to build a new GCR hub due to their seasonal nature and limited ability to retain people long-term. Nevertheless, we do see significant value in diversification and are considering future projects outside established GCR hubs for this reason.

Hope this explains our thinking, happy to answer more questions.

  1. ^

    Mentor access isn't a huge concern for us, since we expect most mentor-mentee interactions to happen virtually either way.

Reply
OscarD🔸2
0
0

Makes sense, sounds good!

Reply
Jamie_Harris6
0
0

Sad news for https://pivotalcontest.org/

(I'm shocked that EA now has two "Blue Dot"s and two "Pivotal"s -- neither of which has the words "effective", "institute", or "initiative" anywhere to be seen.)

Reply
Tobias Häberli3
0
0

We also encourage you to share this opportunity with others who may be a good fit. If we accept any fellow we contacted based on your recommendation, you'll receive $100 for each accepted candidate. The recommendation form is here. 

Reply
More from Tobias Häberli
194
Preparing Effective Altruism for an AI-Transformed World
Tobias Häberli
· · 1m read
24
24
112
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Speech on AI
Tobias Häberli
· · 10m read
6
6
79
[link post] How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force
Tobias Häberli
· · 5m read
1
1
View more
Curated and popular this week
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Dr Kassim
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach? I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk. Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality? EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda? Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources? And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in? Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis? I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today? Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
Recent opportunities in AI safety
15
Applications Open: Pivotal 2025 Q3 Research Fellowship
2 authors
· · 2m read
0
0
4
Register for the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI) Symposium
Grant Higerd-Rusli
· · 1m read
0
0
57
Quick nudge to apply to the LTFF grant round (closing on Saturday)
calebp
· · 1m read
7
7
View more