Claudia Shi

Organizing a "Human-Aligned AI” event at NeurIPS.

Grant date: November 2019

Claudia Shi and Victor Veitch applied for funding to run a social event themed around “Human-aligned AI” at the machine learning conference NeurIPS in December 2019. The aim of the event was to provide a space for NeurIPS attendees who care about doing high-impact projects and/or about long-term AI safety to gather and discuss these topics.

I believe that holding events like this is an easy way to do a very basic form of “field-building,” by making it easier for machine learning researchers who are interested in longtermism and related topics to find each other, discuss their work, and perhaps work together in the future or change their research plans. Our funding was mainly used to cover catering for the 100-person event, which we hoped would make the event more enjoyable for participants and therefore more effective in facilitating discussions and connections. After the event, the organizers had $1863 left over, which they returned to the Fund.