aisafety.community—A living document of AI safety communities
Thanks to plex for co-authoring the post (co-authors are currently not reflected in EA Forum when crossposted from LessWrong).
The AI safety field has been rapidly growing over the last few years, and more and more communities have been sprouting up all over the world, both physically and online.
The Alignment Ecosystem Development (AED) team identified having a living document listing them all as a low-hanging fruit, and volunteers are maintaining this live database of AI safety communities.
Here’s what you can do now:
Join communities you’re interested in and participate.
Link this to your friends.
Add communities to the document if they’re missing (account creation with coda.io is required)
Improve the descriptions of any communities which you’re a part of. Many of the current descriptions are incomplete or outdated, jump right in and share your knowledge.
Volunteer as a maintainer, or join the Alignment Ecosystem Development Discord server, where they host monthly calls to pitch or join shovel ready volunteering opportunities.
Thanks to JJ Hepburn from AI Safety Support for providing the domain through ea.domains, another soon-to-be-launched AED project!
- A newcomer’s guide to the technical AI safety field by (4 Nov 2022 14:29 UTC; 42 points)
- EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (24 − 30th Oct 22′) by (EA Forum; 1 Nov 2022 2:58 UTC; 23 points)
- A newcomer’s guide to the technical AI safety field by (EA Forum; 4 Nov 2022 14:29 UTC; 16 points)
- EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (24 − 30th Oct 22′) by (1 Nov 2022 2:58 UTC; 13 points)
This is the second time this was posted, and I’m really really glad that it was because I forgot about it the first time. It got ~30 upvotes each time (therefore disappearing relatively quickly), even though the second post was improved even further, and it seems unlikely that it will get an appropriate amount of upvotes if posted a third time, even though most people probably missed it both times.
Lesswrong needs some sort of solution to this, Lesswrong as a site should be more optimized towards steering people towards joining groups in person (and the events side tab is still extremely easy to miss). Putting this doc as the “featured banner” at the top is a really good idea (in a week or something, so all the people missing it now will be more likely to see it then instead of double-layering) but it’s a temporary band-aid solution. We need the structure of the site to redirect more people to more in-person groups.
It was not actually reposted exactly, it was just not immediately promoted to frontpage as the mods were had priors about living documents not being kept up to date. Alignment Ecosystem Development sees this as one of our top priorities, and demonstrated that we’re serious about trying to fix this problem.
For generally redirecting people to in-person groups, LessWrong has the Community section in the sidebar, which seems pretty good.
Would be cool if LessWrong hosted subforums/bubbles/research-groups for anyone who wanted to start one and invite their friends. You would have the ability to write a post only to your bubble (visible on your bubble’s frontpage or a private filter to the main frontpage) or choose to crosspost it to main as well. Having the bubbles be on LW provides them a little prestige boost and could stimulate some folk to initiate new research covens for alignment or whatever (or *cough* social epistemology research bubble maybe).
You could also have the option to filter karma so you only see the karma assigned by people in your bubble. Or, just like you can subscribe to get notified when people post, you could “subscribe” to prioritise their karma too. You could make a custom karma-filter individual to you by subscribing to people or groups whose opinions you trust. And the individual-filtered karma could be transitive as well, according to some parameters you set yourself—similar to plex&co’s EigenTrust project except it’d be EigenKarma. There’s more cool stuff here, but I’m probably never going to actually finish a post about it, so better suggest it briefly to someone than not suggest it at all.
OK, done daydreaming. Back to work.
I think part of what you’re describing is what the group functionality on the community tab does? It lets you create a bubble that people can subscribe to, and allows you to make posts only visible on the group page, I think.
Alas, those are just for hosting events. Jic, I tried to check if they have more functionality since I’m an organiser of the EA Gather Town group, but it doesn’t do any of that.
Huh, they must have changed that at some point. I remember being confused about a year ago when I made a normal post to a group expecting it to show up on the front page and it didn’t. The admins confirmed that was intentional.
O.O!
They should bring it back.
Might be worth talking with them about on Intercom? If they had the functionality at some point, that (probably) makes it a lower-cost change to make, if removing it wasn’t because they explicitly decided against it for some reason.
nou. im busy rn, maybe later.
Updates!
Have been continually adding to this, up to 49 online communities.
Added a student groups section, with 12 entries and some extra fields (website, contact, calendar, mailing list), based on the AGISF list (in talks with the maintainer to set up painless syncing between the two systems).
Made a form where you can easily add entries.
Still getting consistent traffic, happy to see it getting used :)
Nice! Is there also a list of AI-safety corporations and non-profits, with a short assessment of each where feasible: goals, techniques, leaders, number of employees, liveness, progress to date?
There certainly should be! This is going to be one of the most important living documents. We’re working on that, using Stampy and borrowing from this post, volunteers very welcome.
Okay, I got a basic version working on the Stampy UI. There’s a lot more to do, and it will need upkeep, but this is a start.
I’m not sure if there’s a live list, but there is this list of orgs, their research, other activities, finances, etc. that Larks has been putting out for the last couple years.
Updates:
Simplified columns (link is now in the name of each entry, rather than a separate column, and made the names bold)
Reordered to put some of the entries added by volunteers nearer the top (unknown people are adding stuff! excellent!)
Moved one now-inactive project to the bottom
Added a note about EA Gather Town’s invite link breaking every month, and to go via the Discord instead.
Updated icon
Added note about who to talk to for one invite-only Slack
Successfully applied for $1k credit for the software, which means we have edit histories enabled on this and all docs for about three years for free
Is this list intended to include university clubs and in-person local groups? I have a list of ~40 university groups, although most of them don’t have a public online presence, and I was wondering if you think they should be added. I believe Blue Dot Impact (formerly EA Cambridge) wanted to make a website listing local groups.
If there’s an existing database of university groups already, it would be great to include a link to that database, perhaps under “Local EA Group”. Thanks!
I tried to add the MIRIx Discord, but it says “changes not saved. copy this doc to fully customize it”. When I close the page and re-open it, my changes disappear.
Sorry about that, updated edit permissions, should work now!
Still doesn’t work: I have the crossed-out-floppy-disk icon and when I click it, it says “changes not saved. copy this doc to fully customize it”.
urg, okay, the settings look like they should work
but they also don’t work for me on an alt account, so I’ve contacted support. I’ve added your ALTER email for now, and if they don’t resolve this we will move to a different platform.
Okay, got a reply and sorted out these settings.
The link in the mail worked, thanks!