(conflict of interest note, I’m pretty good friends with Apart’s founder)
One thing I really like about Apart is how meritocratic it is. Anyone can sign up for a hackathon, and if your project is great, win a prize. They then help prize winners with turning their project into publishable research. This year two prize winners even ended up presenting their work orally at ICLR (!!).
Nobody cares what school you went to. Nobody is looking at your gender age or resume. What matters is the quality of your work and nothing but.
And it turns out that when you look just at quality of the work, you’ll find that it comes from all over the world—often countries that are otherwise underrepresented in the EA and AI safety community. I think that is really really cool.
I think apart could do a much better job at communicating just how different their approach is to the vast majority of AI upskilling programmes, which heavily rely on evaluating your credentials to decide if you’re worthy of doing seriousresearch.
I don’t know anything about the cost-per-participant and whether that justifies funding apart over AI safety projects, but there is something very beautiful and special about Apart’s approach to me.
(conflict of interest note, I’m pretty good friends with Apart’s founder)
One thing I really like about Apart is how meritocratic it is. Anyone can sign up for a hackathon, and if your project is great, win a prize. They then help prize winners with turning their project into publishable research. This year two prize winners even ended up presenting their work orally at ICLR (!!).
Nobody cares what school you went to. Nobody is looking at your gender age or resume. What matters is the quality of your work and nothing but.
And it turns out that when you look just at quality of the work, you’ll find that it comes from all over the world—often countries that are otherwise underrepresented in the EA and AI safety community. I think that is really really cool.
I think apart could do a much better job at communicating just how different their approach is to the vast majority of AI upskilling programmes, which heavily rely on evaluating your credentials to decide if you’re worthy of doing serious research.
I don’t know anything about the cost-per-participant and whether that justifies funding apart over AI safety projects, but there is something very beautiful and special about Apart’s approach to me.