Public Call for Interest in Mathematical Alignment

post by Davidmanheim · 2023-11-22T13:22:09.558Z · LW · GW · 9 comments

Contents

  Bottom line up front:
  More information
  Interested in collaborating?
None
9 comments

Bottom line up front: 

If you are currently working on, or are interested working in any area of mathematical AI alignment, we are collecting names and basic contact information to find who to talk to about opportunities in these areas. If that describes you, please fill out the form! (Please do so even if you think I already know who you are, or people will be left out!)

More information

There are several concrete research agendas in mathematical AI alignment, receiving varying degrees of ongoing attention, with relevance to different possible strategies for AI alignment. These include MIRI’s agent foundations and related work, Learning Theoretic Alignment [AF · GW], Developmental Interpretability [? · GW], Paul Christiano’s theoretical work, RL theory related work done at Far.AI, FOCAL at CMU, Davidad’s “Open Agency” architecture, as well as other work. Currently, as in the past, work in these areas has been conducted mainly in non-academic settings, often not published, and the people involved are scattered - as are other people who want to work on this research.

A group of people, including some individuals at MIRI, Timaeus, MATS, ALTER, PIBBSS, and elsewhere, are hoping to both promote research in these areas, and build bridges between academic and existing independent research. To that end, we are hoping to promote academic conferences, hold or sponsor attendance at research seminars, and announce opportunities and openings for PhD students or postdocs, non-academic positions doing alignment research, and similar. 

As a first step, we want to compile a list of people who are (at least tentatively) interested, and would be happy to hear about projects. This list will not be public, and is likely to involve very few emails to this list, but will be used to find individuals who might want to be invited to programs or opportunities.

Note that we are interested in people at all levels of seniority, including graduate students,  independent researchers, professors, research groups, university department contacts, and others who wish to be informed about future opportunities and programs.

Interested in collaborating?

If you are an academic, or are otherwise more specifically interested in building bridges to academia or collaborating with people in these areas, please mention that in the notes, and we are happy to be in touch with you, or help you contact others working in more narrow areas you are interested in.

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