Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

by merilalama
1 min read 1

38

AI safetyForecastingEpoch AI
Frontpage
This is a linkpost for https://epochai.org/blog/epoch-and-fri-mentorship-program-summer-2023

We are thrilled to announce the Epoch and Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) mentorship program for women, non-binary people, and trans people of all genders. This program aims to provide guidance to individuals who want to contribute to the field of AI forecasting.

The program mentors are Tegan McCaslin (FRI), Molly G Hickman (FRI), Avital Morris (FRI), David Owen (Epoch), Ben Cottier (Epoch) and Pablo Villalobos (Epoch). You can find out more about the mentors in the original post. 

Ajeya Cotra (Open Philanthropy) is a research advisor to the project. The program is coordinated by Jaime Sevilla (Epoch), with the support of Maria de la Lama (Epoch). Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn (Magnify Mentoring) is a program advisor.

Throughout the program, the mentees will work in pairs under the guidance of a mentor to produce original research on Artificial Intelligence Forecasting. Each mentor will offer to guide a selection of projects within their expertise. Examples of projects on offer might include studying trends on the context size of Large Language Models, estimating the computational resources available to large AI companies, studying the applicability of integrated assessment models to AI and synthesizing predictors of task automation difficulty.

Applicants must be over the age of 21 and identify as women, non-binary, and/or transgender. We welcome applications from people who are enthusiastic about AI forecasting, regardless of their level of experience. If you are unsure if you would be a good fit for the program, we encourage you to apply anyway!

The program will run from Monday 3rd of July to Friday 1st of September. We expect a minimum time commitment of 10h/week from participants, including a weekly meeting with your mentor and a second weekly meeting with the rest of program participants. The program will be virtual, free of charge and open to participants around the world[1]. To remove barriers to attendance, we will be offering $1000 stipends to accepted participants who solicit it.

You can apply now and until the 19th 23rd of June through this form. Submit your application today!

 

 

  1. ^

    Program meetings are expected to happen within 16:00 to 19:00 UK time / 8:00 to 11:00 West Coast time. Otherwise participants will be free to arrange their time as best suits them.

38

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments1


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Michał Zabłocki0
0
5

"everyone but cis men" is a pretty vile policy

Reply
More from merilalama
63
Rethink Priorities’ Special Projects Team is hiring
2 authors
· · 7m read
4
4
View more
Curated and popular this week
Sam Anschell
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer. I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable: For organizations * Software or news subscriptions * Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%. * Leases * A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include: * Square footage counted towards rent costs * Lease length * A tenant improvement allowance * Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs) * Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more. * Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV) * Hotel blocks * A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%. * Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage) * Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable) For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup. In my experience, most vendors and companies
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar. We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window. More details on our website. Why we exist We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared. Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future. Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization. This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them. Research Research agendas We are currently pursuing the following perspectives: * Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr
jackva
 ·  · 3m read
 · 
 [Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added] Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions. Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be. Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more. But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.). While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity. When the world seems to
Recent opportunities in AI safety
73
Scaling Wargaming for Global Catastrophic Risks with AI
2 authors
· · 5m read
1
1
167
Forethought: A new AI macrostrategy group
5 authors
· · 4m read
5
5
53
Kairos is hiring a Head of Operations/Founding Generalist
2 authors
· · 6m read
1
1
View more