The idea is to fund and provide logistical/admin support for a reasonably large AI safety conference along the lines of Neurips etc. Academic conferences provide several benefits: 1) Potentially increasing the prestige of an area and boosting the career capital of people who get accepted papers. 2) Networking and sharing ideas, 3) Providing feedback on submitted papers and highlighting important/useful papers. This conference would be unusual in that the work submitted shares approximately the same concrete goal (avoiding risks from powerful AI). While traditional conferences might focus on scientific novelty and complicated/”cool” papers, this conference could have a particular focus on things like reproducibility or correctness of empirical results, peer support and mentorship, non-traditional research mediums (e.g. blog posts/notebooks) , and encouraging authors to have a plausible story for why their work is actually reducing risks from AI.
AI Safety Academic Conference
Technical AI Safety
The idea is to fund and provide logistical/admin support for a reasonably large AI safety conference along the lines of Neurips etc. Academic conferences provide several benefits: 1) Potentially increasing the prestige of an area and boosting the career capital of people who get accepted papers. 2) Networking and sharing ideas, 3) Providing feedback on submitted papers and highlighting important/useful papers. This conference would be unusual in that the work submitted shares approximately the same concrete goal (avoiding risks from powerful AI). While traditional conferences might focus on scientific novelty and complicated/”cool” papers, this conference could have a particular focus on things like reproducibility or correctness of empirical results, peer support and mentorship, non-traditional research mediums (e.g. blog posts/notebooks) , and encouraging authors to have a plausible story for why their work is actually reducing risks from AI.
As Gavin mentioned somewhere here, one significant downside would be to silo AI Safety work from the broader AI community.