Announcing BlueDot Impact

[Dewi]

BlueDot Impact is a non-profit project running courses that support participants to develop the knowledge, community and network needed to pursue high-impact careers.

The purpose of this new organisation is to increase the number of people working on solving some of the world’s most pressing problems in an informed way. We do this by building professional, scalable and high-quality courses. We aim to give participants the opportunity to engage deeply and critically with the literature on particular high-impact fields, meet and collaborate with others interested in the topic, and build an understanding of the opportunities to pursue a career in the space.

We believe there are many great people who are interested in working on important problems and have the skills to contribute, but want additional support to take the career-switching leap. By bringing together communities of such people to engage with material on the field over a sustained period and explore the range of career opportunities available to them, we believe they are more likely to make this leap.

BlueDot Impact was founded by the team who was primarily responsible for running previous rounds of the AGI Safety and Alternative Protein Fundamentals courses. We created a new organisation so that we could focus solely on the courses.

We’re really excited about the amount of interest in the courses, and think they have great potential to build awesome communities around key issues. As such we have spent the last few months:

• Working with pedagogy experts to make discussion sessions more engaging

• Formalising our course design process with greater transparency for participants and facilitators

• Building systems to improve participant networking to create high-value connections

• Collating downstream opportunities for participants to pursue after the courses

• Forming a team that can continue to build, run and improve these courses over the long-term

Learn more about BlueDot Impact here, and register your interest for future rounds of our courses here.

[Linch]

Can I ask why you ended up going with the BlueDot name, given the name collision with another project in the biosecurity space?

[Dewi]

We don’t currently believe the name collision will cause significant issues, and we’re taking steps to mitigate any potential confusions that do arise.

We also discussed the name collision with the other BlueDot in August and September of this year to evaluate how much of an issue it would pose to them and to us, and we ultimately decided to move forward with this name choice.

Some other things:

• We consulted with other advisors within and outside the biosecurity community to evaluate how much of an issue this might pose

• We emphasize that we’re an education-y project that has courses on many different global problems

• Our focus area websites (e.g. the AGI Safety Fundamentals site) are currently the more public-facing brands that we use, as opposed to the project brand (BlueDot Impact), though this might change with time

• We always say “BlueDot Impact,” and not “BlueDot”, and the BlueDot Impact branding is very different from the other BlueDot

I started thinking about alternative names in Summer 2021, and we’ve brainstormed and evaluated many different names since then. BlueDot Impact was overwhelmingly preferred by people we surveyed and within the team. I’m overall very excited about this name and to develop this brand, and hope to be able to collaborate with other stakeholders if/​when confusions arise :)

[pseudonym]

We also discussed the name collision with the other BlueDot in August and September of this year to evaluate how much of an issue it would pose to them and to us, and we ultimately decided to move forward with this name choice.

Does this mean “we discussed this with them and they were happy for us to use the name BlueDot”, or does this mean “we discussed this with them, and they weren’t happy, but we decided the tradeoff was worth it”, or something else?

[Will Bradshaw]

Yeah, given that both BlueDots are active in my biosecurity network (albeit in quite different capacities), I’m a little annoyed about this.

[Neel Nanda]

Really excited to see this initiative! AGISF is one of my favourite AI Safety field building projects, and I’m excited that there’ll be an org focusing and iterating on making this kind of thing better

[harshitajain]

Congrats, team! Excited to see you all scaling the programs to help people build their careers alongside a community. 🚀