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Feel free to submit them at separate times!
Applications may be evaluated on a rolling basis, but we plan to release all acceptance and rejection messages simultaneously. You're welcome to apply early and that will likely help us gauge how much we should prepare for additional applicants!
Owian's stream doesn't have any mentor questions!
From my understanding, this decision is up to the mentors, and only Neel and John are actively planning to reduce the number of scholars. Neel will likely take on more scholars for the training phase than the research phase, and John's scholars willl need to apply for LTFF and receive funding through LTFF before continuing. (Ryan may correct me here if I'm wrong)
That's a valid concern! I appreciate you checking :)
Hi Lao, thanks for the question! I imagine that something like this would qualify toward the accountability cohorts, but I think that a full project would likely need to be making translations as well. One reason is that it seems quite hard to make sure that people who we want to make translations for ML work/biosecurity would learn about the codex enough to popularize them. Another reason is that the projects would be taking up at least ~50 hours of time. But, making translations of useful texts and including recommended word-specific translations like you mention would be more along the lines of what I’m looking for! I’d possibly change my mind if it seems like there’s a big market of people looking for a translation codex, but the current bottleneck to me seems like the full translations themselves.
The inferential gap didn't end up being worked out through conversation and I ended up mainly working that out by reading (Superintelligence, The Precipice, AGI Safety Fundamentals in that order) and bridging the other side of information with my own. I think this was pretty unfortunate time-wise though. Some of the things that were helpful included:
- Increased understanding on my end of how ML worked such that I could understand what "learning" looked like. Once I understood this, it was easier to see how my initial questions might have sounded irrelevant to someone working on AI Safety.
- A better understanding of what an AI planning multiple steps in advance (such as behaving until a treacherous turn) might look like.
- Encountering terms like APS or TAI, which communicated the ideas in ways that don't try to say "general intelligence"
I'd mostly thank AGI Safety Fundamentals for these! I don't regret reading any of those resources, but I do think I'd have come to find AI Safety to be important more quickly if someone had addressed my questions with more understanding of my own background in the early stages.
A couple reasons, but not a ton to do with the contest itself, mostly limited by my capacity at the moment.
One is that I’ve recently been talking to more high schoolers about becoming more involved in EA and I think a lot of the general contests can be intimidating, so a student-focused contest would be helping keep the contest a bit more equal. I think that problem could be fixed with a tier system within the contest, but I’m currently working on my own and don’t have a ton of capacity. Which breeds into the second reason, which is that I plan to be working on a broader scale contest coordination project soon. So, I figured I’d try this as student centered first and see if it’s a good way to do outreach, then if it is I can do it on a larger scale and tiered systems with more support and higher prizes.
I'd be up for increasing the prize pool! I checked with a few students who thought it seemed large enough, but I may be mistaken. How large of a prize pool do you think would be ideal?
I've adjusted the submission form so that it's open to attachments and links now! Thank you to everyone who added thoughts on this! Soon I'll add some notes to my website to encourage people to make posts and apply to Distill's journal :)
Oh, that’s a great point! I’m glad to open to other formats for submissions! PDF was mainly to make the distillations easy to read (as opposed to other formats) because I presumed they would be written. Do you have any recommended formats I open it to, or do you suggest lifting any limitations on format is generally is the best move?
Thank you! This contest is open to PhDs and Master's students as well! I tried not to say it directly in the advertising material so that undergrads may be less intimidated, but thank you for clarifying!
Unfortunately, this contest is only open to students. I may host a larger distillation contest in the future, but this one was designed to increase outreach to university students since contests including professionals may be too intimidating. Thank you for your interest, though!
You can participate from any country! The submission should just be in English (but, if you'd like to additionally submit in another language, that could be cool to increase accessibility).
The target audience would ideally be a few levels lower than the audience of the original piece. If it was originally written for alignment researchers, then making the paper accessible to a CS student is good, but making it accessible to people who have never heard of alignment could be even better (although certainly harder). This is what the "accessibility" scoring point would be focusing on, but it's far from the only factor.
You can publish the post before the contest ends, but please indicate that the post is intended to be part of the contest! We'd ideally like to be encouraging people to create content they wouldn't have without the contest.
A pseudonym works! Publishing names would mainly be to help students build social capital, so it's an optional part of winning.
I think that as long as you faithfully explain parts of the original posts you would be very welcome to add to the discussion.
(Would also love to hear answers to the last question!)
Yes! Apologies, none of my links carried over to this post, so I'll edit them in now. The poster will be linked in the final notes section.