Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative

• This is funding for Prof. Philip Thomas to hire a research engineer to create a library for easily using Seldonian machine learning algorithms. I think that the Seldonian framework, compared to many other ways of thinking about machine learning algorithms, centers real safety concerns in a useful way. Though I am less excited about the particular Seldonian algorithms that currently exist, I am excited about Prof. Thomas continuing to push the general Seldonian framework and this seems like a reasonably good way to do so.

The biggest caveat with this grant was primarily that Prof. Thomas had very little experience hiring and managing research engineers, suggesting that it might be quite difficult for him to actually turn this grant into productive engineering work. However, both BERI and I have provided Prof. Thomas with some assistance in this domain, and I am hopeful that this grant will end up producing good work.