Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by Liam 🔸
2 min read 1

13

AI safetyBiosecurityBuilding effective altruismCareer choiceWorkshops / Retreats / Summits
Frontpage

Global Challenges Project (GCP) is running intensive three-day workshops in 2025 to help students deepen their understanding of AI safety and biosecurity, meet like-minded peers, and gain career insights.

 

Apply now

 

We currently have six workshops planned for 2025. Applications for our next workshop in Boston are due in less than one week—apply by Sunday, December 15th.

Workshop LocationDatesApplication DeadlineEligible Locations for Requesting Travel Support
BostonJanuary 17-20December 15North and South America
OxfordMarch 28-31February 16Europe, Africa, Oceania
OxfordJuly 11-14June 1Europe, Africa, Oceania
BostonOctober 10-13August 31North and South America
BerkeleyNovember (TBD)TBDNorth America, South America, Oceania
OxfordDecember 19-22November 9Europe, Africa, Oceania

What happens at a GCP workshop?

Our workshops are designed to help students gain a deeper understanding of AI safety and biosecurity, determine where they stand on these issues, and explore potential career paths in each field.

Our workshops provide:

  • Comprehensive overviews of AI safety and biosecurity fundamentals
  • Opportunities to connect with like-minded students who think seriously about effective altruism, AI safety, and biosecurity
  • Insights from professionals working in the field
  • Career guidance, recommendations, and resources tailored to AI safety and biosecurity

You can find our full workshop schedule here.

Am I a good fit?

We are looking for students (aged 18+) who have demonstrated interest in learning more about AI safety and biosecurity. You might be a good fit if any of these describe you:

  • You’re interested in exploring these fields because you think they’re worth seriously considering, but you aren’t yet sure how high priority they are
  • You’ve engaged with introductory materials on effective altruism, AI safety, or biosecurity, and you’re thinking through your cause prioritization, but you’re unsure about next steps and feel like you would benefit from engaging in discussions with others
  • You’re motivated to contribute to AI safety or biosecurity and are currently trying to plan your career around contributing to these fields

To accommodate a range of backgrounds, we assign pre-reading materials to all attendees before the workshop to get them up to speed with the basics of AI safety and biosecurity.

See our advice for applying to our workshops for more resources on applying.

Note: A rejected application is not a signal that you shouldn’t continue exploring these fields or applying for future opportunities. Our admissions process aims to select applicants who we think might benefit most from the workshop given the stage that they are at right now.

How much does it cost?

Each workshop has a ticket fee of $35, which includes catered meals and on-site accommodation during the workshop. Travel support is available for those who are otherwise unable to attend.

What can I do?

  • Apply now! The application takes 15-30 minutes to complete.
  • Express interest: Stay informed about future workshops here.
  • Spread the word: Share this opportunity with friends or peers who might benefit.

13

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments1


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Anto Boetsch1
0
0

Hi Liam, this was added to the EA Opportunities Board! 

Reply
More from Liam 🔸
64
Updates from the Dutch EA community
9 authors
· · 12m read
3
3
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
 ·  · 9m read
 · 
TL;DR In a sentence:  We are shifting our strategic focus to put our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI, while keeping our existing content up. In more detail: We think it’s plausible that frontier AI companies will develop AGI by 2030. Given the significant risks involved, and the fairly limited amount of work that’s been done to reduce these risks, 80,000 Hours is adopting a new strategic approach to focus our efforts in this area.   During 2025, we are prioritising: 1. Deepening our understanding as an organisation of how to improve the chances that the development of AI goes well 2. Communicating why and how people can contribute to reducing the risks 3. Connecting our users with impactful roles in this field 4. And fostering an internal culture which helps us to achieve these goals We remain focused on impactful careers, and we plan to keep our existing written and audio content accessible to users. However, we are narrowing our focus as we think that most of the very best ways to have impact with one’s career now involve helping make the transition to a world with AGI go well.   This post goes into more detail on why we’ve updated our strategic direction, how we hope to achieve it, what we think the community implications might be, and answers some potential questions. Why we’re updating our strategic direction Since 2016, we've ranked ‘risks from artificial intelligence’ as our top pressing problem. Whilst we’ve provided research and support on how to work on reducing AI risks since that point (and before!), we’ve put in varying amounts of investment over time and between programmes. We think we should consolidate our effort and focus because:   * We think that AGI by 2030 is plausible — and this is much sooner than most of us would have predicted 5 years ago. This is far from guaranteed, but we think the view is compelling based on analysis of the current flow of inputs into AI
Recent opportunities in AI safety
35
AIS Netherlands is looking for a Founding Executive Director (EOI form)
7 authors
· · 5m read
3
3
20
Applications Open: Pivotal 2025 Q3 Research Fellowship
2 authors
· · 2m read
0
0
4
The Centre for Long-Term Resilience is recruiting a Policy and Operations Strategist
Tatiana K. Nesic Skuratova
· · 4m read
0
0
View more