I’m not [...] Bluedot and don’t want to tell them what they should prioritise! IIRC Bluedot was thinking about doing some version of this eventually, but it likely won’t happen in 2025
At a meta level, BlueDot would be open to people suggesting what they think would be good for us to do more directly to us! (Although we don’t commit to actually doing it).
As for BlueDot’s plans, I’d say:
BlueDot is already doing this to some extent. In 2024, we:
Directly collaborated with some groups to provide more specific support.
BlueDot is NOT currently directly planning to provide a lot more support for local groups running courses. This is because:
We tried this before with a few groups, and found that adding a third party to organizing a course (especially for smaller courses) can actually add more work than it saves. And local environments can be very different, or people might want to focus on different things than we do.
Operations vary a lot between different courses. This makes it very hard to offer a solution that fits many groups. (But valuable work we’d be keen for others to do here would be collating the problems different groups have in a Mom Test style, and proposing some potential solutions).
We were considering opening up our learning platform to local groups. While local groups are encouraged to use our platform for the core courses, we decided making everything robust to the many changes local groups wanted was not feasible with our current team’s capacity. In the meantime, there are many other platforms out there for local groups to use, especially because student groups can usually get away with slightly more janky setups (e.g. a Google Doc + some Google Forms can go a long way!).
We also want to focus on supporting the field more broadly than just in educational programs, as we think this might be very high impact (see below).
However, BlueDot is looking to support the broader AI safety field in other ways than just courses this year—becoming a broader field catalyst.
This is likely to involve thinking through which external (to BlueDot) actors we should be supporting more, and being more intentional about our collaborations. This could very well involve much more local group support (although precise details haven’t been worked out yet).
Some directions outside facilitated educational programs we’ve been considering include:
At a meta level, BlueDot would be open to people suggesting what they think would be good for us to do more directly to us! (Although we don’t commit to actually doing it).
As for BlueDot’s plans, I’d say:
BlueDot is already doing this to some extent. In 2024, we:
Published guidance on running our courses is on our website.
Released all our curriculum materials, exercises, rubrics, session plans publicly.
Open-sourced almost all our software tools, plus recorded YouTube tutorials for how to set them up and use them (which several groups have told us they are now using).
Published many of our learnings from running courses on our new blog.
Directly collaborated with some groups to provide more specific support.
BlueDot is NOT currently directly planning to provide a lot more support for local groups running courses. This is because:
We tried this before with a few groups, and found that adding a third party to organizing a course (especially for smaller courses) can actually add more work than it saves. And local environments can be very different, or people might want to focus on different things than we do.
Operations vary a lot between different courses. This makes it very hard to offer a solution that fits many groups. (But valuable work we’d be keen for others to do here would be collating the problems different groups have in a Mom Test style, and proposing some potential solutions).
We were considering opening up our learning platform to local groups. While local groups are encouraged to use our platform for the core courses, we decided making everything robust to the many changes local groups wanted was not feasible with our current team’s capacity. In the meantime, there are many other platforms out there for local groups to use, especially because student groups can usually get away with slightly more janky setups (e.g. a Google Doc + some Google Forms can go a long way!).
We also want to focus on supporting the field more broadly than just in educational programs, as we think this might be very high impact (see below).
However, BlueDot is looking to support the broader AI safety field in other ways than just courses this year—becoming a broader field catalyst.
This is likely to involve thinking through which external (to BlueDot) actors we should be supporting more, and being more intentional about our collaborations. This could very well involve much more local group support (although precise details haven’t been worked out yet).
Some directions outside facilitated educational programs we’ve been considering include:
developing an AI safety strategy
better placement/recruiting services (for both job-seekers and employers); and
broader public education.