The competition was cancelled. I think the funding for it was cut, though @Oliver Z can say more. I was not involved in this decision.

Thanks for this! I think it would be helpful to plot the median changes in extinction probabilities against the number of words in the article/video. I'm noticing a correlation as I click through the links and would be curious how strong it is (so this effect can be disentangled from the style of the source).

That's a good point. Here's another possibility:
Require that students go through a 'research training program' before they can participate in the research program. It would have to actually help prepare them for technical research though. Relabeling AGISF as a research training program would be misleading, so you would want to add a lot more technical content (reading papers, coding assignments, etc.)  It would probably be pretty easy to gauge how much the training program participants care about X-risk / safety and factor that in when deciding whether to accept them into the research program.

The social atmosphere can also probably go a long way in influencing people's attitudes towards safety. Making AI risk an explicit focus of the club, talking about it a lot at socials, inviting AI safety researchers to dinners, etc might do most of the work tbh.

Oo exciting. Yeah, the research program looks like it is closer to what I'm pitching. 

Though I'd also be excited about putting research projects right at the start of the pipeline (if they aren't already). It looks like AGISF is still at the top of your funnel and I'm not sure if discussion groups like these will be as good for attracting talent.

Late to the party here, but I was wondering why these organizations need aligned engineering talent. Anthropic seems like the kind of org that talented, non-aligned people would be interested in...

These are reasonable concerns, thanks for voicing them. As a result of unforeseen events, we became responsible for running this iteration only a couple of weeks ago. We thought that getting the program started quickly — and potentially running it at a smaller scale as a result — would be better than running no program at all or significantly cutting it down.

The materials (lectures, readings, homework assignments) are essentially ready to go and have already been used for MLSS last summer. Course notes are supplementary and are an ongoing project.

We are putting a lot of hours into making sure this program gets started without a hitch and runs smoothly. We are sorry the deadlines are so aggressive and agree that it would have been better to launch earlier. If you have trouble getting your application in on time, please don't hesitate to contact us about getting an extension. We also plan to run another iteration in the Spring and announce the program further in advance.