Hi jskatt, great question! I’m a research analyst at Concordia and this is what I said in my Feb 2022 SERI talk re: AI alignment/safety-sympathetic resources/institutions in China:
“Over the past few years, Chinese researchers and policy stakeholders have demonstrated increasing interest in AI safety.
For instance, last year two AI scientists from China’s AI Strategic Advisory Committee, which advises national policy on AI, wrote an article talking about the risks from AGI and potential countermeasures. The two scientists, Huang Tiejun and Gao Wen, along with their colleagues, present a summary of possible approaches to alignment based on Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, and cite other classic works in the Western AI alignment community like Concrete Problems in AI Safety and Life 3.0. The article acknowledged the relative lack of attention to AGI safety in China, and recommended “examining international discussions…of AGI policies, integrating cutting-edge legal and ethical findings, and exploring the elements of China’s AGI policymaking in a deeper and more timely manner.”
In the same year, Huang Tiejun and the chairperson of one of China’s top AI labs, the Beijing Academy of AI, endorsed the Chinese translation of Human Compatible, a book on AI alignment written by Professor Stuart Russell, who’ll be speaking at this conference tomorrow. Zhang Hongjiang also participated in a dialogue with Stuart at one of China’s most prestigious AI conferences, talking about the book and AGI safety.
But despite these cases of high-profile support for AGI safety, many Chinese AI safety researchers focus on areas like robustness and interpretability instead of more alignment-relevant topics like goal specification.”
Separately, the org I work at – Concordia – aims to promote the safe and responsible development of AI, with a particular focus on China (more). For example, we recently wrapped up the first ever lecture series on AI alignment in China, which included speakers Rohin Shah, Max Tegmark, David Krueger, Paul Christiano, Brian Christian, and Jacob Steinhardt. To market this lecture series, we also translated a bunch of AI alignment works from English into Chinese.
I’d be happy to have a chat about this, just messaged you.
Tianxia 天下 and Concordia Consulting 安远咨询 are the main organizations in the space. If you're interested in getting involved in those communities, let me know and I can connect you!
I think it is much higher priority (from the perspective of reducing AI x-risk) to translate AI alignment concepts, particularly the AGI Safety Fundamentals course material. It takes a lot of inferences to go from "I'm interested in doing good" to "I like EA ideas" to "I think AI alignment is important" to "I want to work on AI, where can I start?" And even if many Mandarin speakers reach that last point through a Mandarin translation of 80,000 Hours, they will currently find very few (if any?) structuredopportunities to skillup for AI alignment.
Thanks for sharing these. The Chinese Association for AGI appears to focus on advancing AI capabilities rather than AI safety. I used Google Translate to translate the lead paragraph of the website's current opening page:
Notice of the 7th China General Artificial Intelligence Annual Conference
The China General Artificial Intelligence Annual Conference has been successfully held for six consecutive sessions. It is an annual event for Chinese general artificial intelligence enthusiasts, involving computer science, philosophy, logic, education, psychology, sociology, law, medicine and other disciplines. In order to better demonstrate and promote the research and application of general artificial intelligence, the 7th China General Artificial Intelligence Annual Conference in 2022 will be held at Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou City.
[Question]
Does China have AI alignment resources/institutions? How can we prioritize creating more?
That's just one thought that motivated me to write this question. It would be extremely valuable to introduce Chinese students and professionals to AGI safety. Not only because China has a strong AIindustry, but also because China has >1.4 billion people. Yet as far as I know, most AI alignment projects and organizations target English speakers. I've spent very little time researching AI alignment in China, and I could certainly be wrong.
If people want to do more research, I'd recommend the 2022 AI Index Report. Here is a (possibly misleading; again, I haven't looked into this carefully) graph from page 26:
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
Hi jskatt, great question! I’m a research analyst at Concordia and this is what I said in my Feb 2022 SERI talk re: AI alignment/safety-sympathetic resources/institutions in China:
Separately, the org I work at – Concordia – aims to promote the safe and responsible development of AI, with a particular focus on China (more). For example, we recently wrapped up the first ever lecture series on AI alignment in China, which included speakers Rohin Shah, Max Tegmark, David Krueger, Paul Christiano, Brian Christian, and Jacob Steinhardt. To market this lecture series, we also translated a bunch of AI alignment works from English into Chinese.
I’d be happy to have a chat about this, just messaged you.