Announcing Arcadia Impact
Arcadia Impact is a non-profit organisation that enables individuals in London to use their careers to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. We have existed for over a year as London EA Hub (LEAH) and we recently rebranded as an organisation to Arcadia Impact.
Our current projects:
Effective Altruism Group Support
We’re also currently hiring for two roles (details below).
EA Group Support
We support EA groups at Imperial, UCL, KCL, and LSE[1] which includes mentoring student organisers, encouraging collaboration between groups, and running events such as retreats.
All four universities are ranked in the top 50 globally, with over 114,000 students collectively, presenting significant potential to build capacity to address pressing global problems. London offers a unique concentration of highly talented students, and therefore an exciting opportunity for EA groups to benefit from collaboration and coordination. Additionally, London is the world’s largest EA hub, with an extensive network of professionals working on various causes. Despite this London university groups have historically lacked consistent organiser capacity relative to comparable universities.
Since we were founded last year, the groups have reached hundreds of students, with over 200 applying to reading groups. Students who joined our programmes have started full-time roles, attended research programmes, or continued studying with the goal of contributing to a range of EA cause areas. Given the size and potential of the universities, we think there is still significant room to expand and improve our work.
Safe AI London
We support AI Safety field building activities with Safe AI London (SAIL) supporting individuals in London to find careers that reduce risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
We do this by:
Running targeted outreach to technical courses at Imperial and UCL due to the concentration of talent on Computer Science and related courses.
Educating people on the alignment problem, through technical and governance reading groups and speaker events.
Up-skilling people on machine learning through upskilling programmes or by encouraging them to apply to programmes such as ARENA.
Allowing them to test their fit for research through MARS London, research sprints, and connecting them to other research opportunities such as MATS.
Creating a community of people in London and connecting people to opportunities within the field through socials and retreats.
London is Europe’s largest hub for AI talent and is becoming an increasingly relevant location for AI safety, with Google DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI opening offices here, and AI Safety researchers at MATS, Conjecture, and Center on Longterm Risk. The UK Government has also launched the AI Safety Institute which is working on AI Safety Research within the UK government.
AI Safety university groups have shown promising results over the last year and London universities have a unique concentration of talented students relevant to AI safety with Imperial and UCL ranked in the top 25 universities for computer science courses globally.
LEAH Coworking Space
The LEAH Coworking Space is an office space in central London used by professionals and students working on impactful projects. The office aims to provide value from:
Improving the productivity of professionals doing impactful work. In our most recent user survey, users reported an average of 6.3 additional productive hours per week from using the space.
Causing impactful connections and interactions between users.
Various situations where we offer assistance to the wider community:
Allowing other organisations to use the space for events.
Enabling in-person meetings and coworking for remote organisations.
We also benefit from using the space to host many of our events including research sprints, reading groups, and socials.
Since we moved offices in May 2023 (~8.5 months ago), we have recorded a total of >21,000 person-hours across >2,800 visits to our space and 191 unique users including visitors[2] and guests.
If you are interested in applying to join the space, you can apply using this form.
We’re Hiring
We are currently hiring for two roles:
Head of Groups: Lead our work on supporting Effective Altruism Groups at Imperial, UCL, KCL, and LSE including mentoring group leaders, running inter-university events, running events, and connecting the groups with opportunities in the EA community.
Head of AI Safety: Lead our work on AI Safety field-building through Safe AI London including running reading groups, hackathons, machine learning upskilling programmes, and designing programmes for more advanced students.
Apply by 19th January.
We expect the ideal candidates for these roles will be highly familiar with the relevant ideas and feel comfortable working independently.
If you’d like to learn more about the roles, we are running a drop-in session at 5 pm GMT on the 5th of January. Add to calendar, video call link.
If you have any questions or want to find out more about our work, then get in touch!
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We also work closely with EA Northeastern London.
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We estimate the actual person-hours and number of visits is higher than this due to users forgetting/not signing in and out.
Neat! As someone who’s not on the ground and doesn’t know much about either initiative, I’m curious what Arcadia’s relationship is London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA)? Mostly in the spirit of “if I know someone in AI safety in London, in what cases should I recommend them to each?”
Thanks for the question! We aren’t connected in any official capacity and haven’t collaborated on any projects.
For the events we run, they are focused on students and young professionals that haven’t engaged with AI safety arguments or the community before. LISA is more focused on those already doing relevant research. As office spaces, the majority of our users attend as individuals (working independently or as the only person from their organisation), while LISA is hosts organisations and up-skilling programs. Our office has a wider focus than just AI safety although I expect there is some overlap in the people we would accept, and a small number of users that are signed up to both offices.
Thanks!